Old Haunts
by The Blue Footed Booby
Summary: The adventures of Gia and her talking car, the sequel to Dead Man's Curve, and the horrid perversion of everything Kino's Journey ever stood for.
1. Chapter 1

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My name is Gia, and this is my story. It's a good story, but it's not a very nice story. No, not at all. If you've never heard of me and you find yourself a little confused, you should go read about my friend Kino first, especially "Reprise" and "Threnody." That's where I come in.

I wish my story was nicer, though it does end well. Some very bad things happened to me, and I'm gonna be forthright about 'em. Maybe you're not ready to hear about those things, and if that's so, feel free to go away and come back when you are. I'll still be here. Promise.

* * *

_**Old Haunts**_

– _**White Line Nightmare**_

* * *

"Let's get this clear – I could kill you whenever I want!"

With that, the car seat jumped forward. The girl had no chance. Petite though she was, the steering wheel slammed into her belly and cut off her air. She shoved against it; she kicked the floorboard with all the strength she could muster. Then, uselessly, stupidly, she started flailing and beating her limbs.

The seat backed off a little, until the girl could breathe again. She reeled in shock. The car could talk, and it had her trapped inside its steel cage. It was as if some dreadful animal had swallowed her; it was strangling her.

The car that had trapped her was ancient. Gia had gaped in wonder at it because the vehicle, stopped at the trucker's rest stop, proudly defied time and glistened showroom-new beneath the halo of a streetlight. Such a vehicle had not been manufactured in... how many lifetimes? An old tune from long ago played on its speakers. The driver's side door hung open, and Gia had looked around for the driver. Her family had thought themselves alone here, so late at night.

So Gia peeked into the miraculously perfect interior, marvelled at the oxblood leather seats and impossibly gleaming chrome, batted her head to the rhythm. "Don't you know that I'll always be true..." a female voice sang, and before she quite knew what had happened she jolted awake from something like a hypnotic trance, found herself seated behind the wheel when the car door slammed shut, and the thing came alive all around her and sped off. That was the only word - _the thing is alive!_

Now even if Gia somehow squirmed free and outside, the monster would easily run her down. At the moment the hapless girl could see nothing from the windows but some brush illuminated by the headlights, and country dark beyond. She could hear nothing but crickets, hypnotic electronic organ music and the ringing in her ears. "This isn't... this can't be happening," she muttered to the night.

"I get that a lot."

"Must be the... dumbest thing I've ever heard of... a haunted car," she mumbled mirthlessly to herself. Automated systems that would give their drivers directions she'd seen. _But I've only ever met one vehicle that could really talk: Hermes! _The motorcycle had been the possession of a woman she'd met named Kino, though Kino treated her prissy contraption more like a partner. Before they'd strapped the bike to the back of her parents' truck, Kino had introduced Hermes without even a trace of irony. _A talking bike, a haunted car... is there some connection? Is this thing like Hermes? Why is it here?_

"Now let's start again little miss... what is your name anyway?"

"Gia," she answered, her breath wheezing in and out hoarsely. "It's—" she coughed. "...short for Georgiana." Despite the weirdness of her situation, Gia's voice sounded matter-of-fact, even to herself.

"Now Gia, I'm gonna ask you some questions. First, what's up with your hair?" The strange voice had a tone of mocking amusement. _It can afford to toy with its prey._

Gia blinked. "My parents made me have an operation."

"What for?"

"To make me a grown-up," Gia answered as if reciting numbers from a phone book.

"...ooookay. You care to expand on that?"

"They cut the child out of me. Because I wasn't obe—" Gia coughed. "Obedient."

The car seat slowly fell back, but not completely. After a few breaths, Gia felt comfortable again. She fought the urge to pass out. Something dripped on her lip and she knew the nosebleed had started again.

"So your hair's only now just growin' back." The sly voice seemed to come from the car's speakers, and perhaps from the incongruous modern dash-mounted AV system occupying a slot once held by the radio.

Gia nodded.

"That's why you've got those scabby dents in your head, why your face looks all wrong. So now you gotta do everything your folks say? Is that right?"

"Uh huh," the girl said quietly.

The headlights flicked off. Gia could see nothing now, except for the green glow from the dashboard boring into her like eyes. She shivered.

"You wanna talk about it?"

Gia blinked. That was the last thing she expected the malevolent voice to say.

"Uhm... my folks took me there, to the hospital." she answered into the warm darkness. "It's in a town maybe a hundred miles back. Daddy told us he needed some medicine. Then the nurses said they wanted to do a blood test on me. I didn't know anything was wrong until these big orderlies strapped me down." Her vacuous tone contrasted with the vivacious malignance from the AV system.

"Go on."

"Then the nurse cut off all my hair. She shaved my head and put iodine all over my scalp. It was cold. I was screaming bloody murder but she didn't react at all. She just smiled this horrible crooked smile and told me in this monotone all about how the operation would make me a perfect grown-up, able to do jobs I hated. Just like her."

Gia winced; the headache she'd occasionally suffered ever since was back.

"She wheeled me into the operating room. The doctor shoved a needle in my arm and a mask over my mouth–"

"That's enough!" The voice sounded harsh, but Gia could tell somehow that the thing did not want to hear any more. "Yeah, that place. I know all about it. Your parents took you there, deceived you – why? Why'd they do that? What'd you do that was so wrong?"

"I... uhm, I liked girls. Mostly. But not anymore. Daddy told me never to do that again. So I can't. 'Cause I'm a grown-up now_." Except I... don't feel grown up,_ she added to herself._ I don't feel the same at all. I'm not Georgiana anymore._

She leaned forward thoughtfully onto the steering wheel. "I'm just 'Gia' now; I've been abbreviated."

The car mulled over what she had said.

"Huh! Shitters sucked your brains out through your nose... your own parents! How do you like that?"

"It's good," Gia said, feeling the surgery compel her to answer the question literally. "I'm not a disappointment to them anymore. I love my parents-"

"Horse _shit!_" The voice screeched. The seat slammed Gia into the steering wheel again. She coughed up every last bit of air and fought back an urge to vomit.

"Now you tell me the truth, half-a-girl!" the voice demanded. "You got enough brains left in your head to say what you really feel?"

"Huh..." Gia said.

"Well...?"

"I huh... hut..." The eerily composed face crumpled inward. The seat loosened just enough for a sob to escape her.

Then–

"I HATE THEM!" Gia beat her fists against the metal steering wheel. "I huh... huh..." and the moment was over. The damaged smile reasserted itself.

"I love them. But I hate them," Gia said quietly, once again sounding like an automated phone-tree.

"Good. That was really, really good." And the seat loosened gently and completely. Somehow, Gia sensed that the danger had passed.

"I bet that was hard. Alright, Gia was it? I'm gonna ask a question. I want you to think very carefully before you answer. Will you do that?" The mysterious voice had lost its hostile edge. Now it sounded like an older, smarter sister whispering confidences and secrets.

"Of course," Gia said. And she sounded chipper again. She smiled, and the smile was crooked.

"I got tissues in the glove compartment."

Gia politely thanked the car, found the box and mopped the blood from her face.

"Okay, as it happens, turning you into street pizza would seriously hack certain parties off. That's why I set about hunting you, but... aw hell, this whole situation's gone six different kinds of fucked-up! Look, just for you... Gia, how would you like to just go to sleep in that seat and never wake up? I can do that." The husky female voice sounded gentle now, and sad. "Do you wanna die?"

_Good question!_ She'd struggled because of panic, but the truth was her life was now a waking nightmare. Whenever her parents told her to do something, the part of her brain that let her stop to consider and to make up her own mind was missing. Just gone. She felt trapped inside a body that constantly betrayed her. Gia sat back. The plush leather was so warm and comfortable. She considered with all that remained for her to consider with... _what would it be like to curl up in here and never have to leave?_

"I don't know. I don't care either way. You decide."

There was a long pause. Even the crickets outside had fallen silent.

"Heh! Isn't that a thought..." the car muttered. "Taking you with me would torque 'em off even more, now wouldn't it?" The voice laughed, and the car's quiet laughter dripped with malice, like a cartoon supervillain. "Tell you a secret, Gia: I like girls too, sometimes. You know how to drive stick?"

"Yeah. My folks taught me how to drive the truck."

"Innocent," the voice laughed. "We'll work on that." The motor snarled awake all on its own, startling Gia. The headlights flared. The menacing song burst from the AV system and the voice sang along, "oh won't you come with me, as I walk this land? Please take my hand." The strange red vehicle pivoted under Gia until they could see in the valley below the lonesome rest area where her family had stopped, and the boarded-up diner where the car had waited for her.

"Your parents're still down there," the car said.

"...looking for me."

They watched together until her parents climbed into their truck and set off. Like a cat pursuing prey, the car abruptly leaped downhill to catch them.

"Oops! You'll wanna put on the seat belts. You're my new driver. You 'n me, we're gonna have some fun together. You'll see."

Gia scrambled to yank the racing belts over her shoulders. "What are you doing?" she asked, her voice distorted by the bouncing of the rough terrain under them. But she already suspected the answer.

"You know how to take a big truck like that apart with a car?"

"No."

The strange talking automobile found the highway. "Well I'm gonna teach you. Hit the gas. Now pay attention – the most fun way's to punch the exhaust system in just the right spot, then scare 'em into running. No no, c'mon! Floor it, girl, we don't have all night!"

The operation did its work, and Gia did as she was told. The car accelerated, faster and harder than anything she'd ever felt before. Gia felt sweat break out on her forehead. Her sick, asymetrical smile vanished.

"I've never driven this fast!" Gia protested. A quaver broke through her vapid tone. The road's white line pulsed by beneath them, in sync to the rapid guitar riffs buzzing wordlessly in her ears. In a few pounding heartbeats, their headlights gleamed from the back doors of her parents' trailer. "...Please slow down."

"Ain't seen nothing yet!" the car said. "Kick it into high gear, and punch that red button next to the shifter." Gia obeyed because she couldn't disobey, try as she might. Her foot stomped on the clutch and her finger hit the wide button. The monster hurtled down the highway with her, a great roaring chariot of steel possessed by... what? What had claimed her as its thrall?

Gia felt the transmission change and heard a subtle hiss. At the same instant the cabin light flicked on. Gia knew, with a sick feeling in her stomach, that the sadist into whose clutches she'd fallen _wanted_ her parents to see her at the wheel.

"I am very pleased to meet you, Gia. I am the Fury Ti-sih-foe-nee." The car's dazzling brights ignited. The tires squealed and with a roar like an amazon's battle cry, the great engine lunged forward, pinning the girl to her seat.

"You may call me Christine."

* * *

_**"I'm trying to take you on a journey that's worthwhile and enlightening."**_

_**"If you can picture the exact opposite of that..."**_

* * *

_**.**_


	2. Chapter 2

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"You okay?"

Gia dabbed at the blood dripping onto her lips and shook her head no. "The headache's back. Mind if I pull over?"

"I'll take it for a while." And Gia felt the controls come alive in her hands. It was strange, sitting in the driver's seat yet surrendering control to an unseen entity. Gia let go of the wheel and tilted her head up to stop the nosebleed.

"I sometimes wonder why you keep me around," Gia admitted.

"Yeah, you don't wanna tempt fate like that, hon."

"I mean you drive perfectly well yourself."

"I've got more important things to do; you can tend to that... when you can." And Christine's tone betrayed concern for her driver.

"The doctors said the headaches and nosebleeds wouldn't last more than two weeks."

"The hard riding's wearing you down." The car rode silently for a minute. Then the AV system lit up and projected a map onto the reflective surface of the windshield.

"Okay, change of plan. In three miles, make a right turn."

"I didn't know you could do that!" Gia said, pleased. "Heads-up display - pretty high tech for an old car. Someone's put a lot of money into you."

"GPS's tip of the iceburg," Christine said proudly.

"What else you got?"

"Modesty forbids."

"Uh huh! Couldn't stop you now if I wanted."

"Hard part was getting an old V-8 to run on modern fuels. Catalytic converter... I care about the environment, y'know."

"Don't polish your halo just yet."

"Limited slip differential, heavy-duty brakes, nice speakers, supercharger intake up front an' all the structural improvements that gotta come with that. Wider rims and tires in back for traction. Traded the ol' pushbuttons for a manual transmission. Kinda miss those."

"Nitrous," Gia added, lightly tapping the red button attached to the stick.

"Do not touch that 'less you wanna use it," Christine warned. "Doubt I'm street-legal, but those laws change so much I can't be bothered to keep track. Refittin' me with an active suspension was expensive too."

"I don't even know what that is." Gia followed the GPS's directions and made the turn from route thirty-nine onto route five. "Where're we headed?"

"I'm gonna talk to some old contacts. Get the 'secure courier' job going again."

"Smuggling contraband."

"It keeps fuel in the tank. You on the other hand are going to rest. Reminds me, you'll need food. Hope the diner in Hillsdale's still open."

Gia smiled. _Christine can be very thoughtful._ _Odd how she can be so kind one minute and a monster the next._

"I know a quiet, out-of-the-way place you can rest up in 'til I get back."

* * *

_**Down Route Five.**_

_**- Halfway House**_

* * *

Gia took over the driving because of the roughness of the road. It was an old country road, barely more than a trail. She knew that Christine, ever impatient, would beat them both half senseless at the speeds she preferred.

"Uhf! My rest holiday's off to a terrific start." She winced. The headache was getting bad enough to make her nauseous.

The smell of food permeated the car. They had pulled up to the receiver in the diner's drive-in lane and Christine had ordered, in her own voice, several to-go boxes of chicken, hamburgers and sandwiches – three days worth to be safe. Plenty to last, she'd explained, until her return. Gia had not been too surprised to find, at Christine's direction, a small envelope of spending money hidden away in the otherwise unused ashtray.

"It's not much further," Christine encouraged. The GPS had called their turnoff an "unnamed road" and become useless. They were off the map. Gia shut it down and stared at the rough, neglected pavement and grass coming at them by the brights' illumination.

Her ears popped. "We're going up into the hills."

Abruptly they found a gate, rusted and derelict. Hinges on either side dug into high brick walls that vanished into the night's blackness.

"Some resort!" Gia idled to a stop. "Where are you taking me?"

Christine honked her horn, startling a year from the end of Gia's life. The noise seemed so unwelcome in this close night hush.

"No one's going to come to the gate at this hour."

"Huh!" Christine grunted. "Drive through it anyway."

"I can't do that. It's illegal."

"Oh right, the operation. Gia, I'm telling you to drive through that gate."

Gia complied. The formidable-looking gate had rusted over the years, and the impact from so strong a car as the Fury knocked it right off its rotted hinges. The noise was terrific.

They followed the pavement along a right turn. Gia watched, entranced, as the car's damage healed itself before her eyes. Abruptly Christine's fierce halogen lights, another of her aftermarket modifications, settled upon a set of stairs and a doorway. Gia could just sense a mansion looming over them but couldn't make out details. No lights burned inside.

"Christine?" Gia protested. "Is it abandoned?" She idled into neutral and pulled the parking brake.

"Yup. You'll have it all to yourself. It's got power and running water from its own well. Been quite a while since I saw it, but some places never change. You'll be made real welcome and cozy. Now go on."

Unable to do otherwise, Gia found a flashlight and opened Christine's door. She proceeded up the steps. They felt very solid and did not creak under her feet. She reached a grand veranda with stone columns, and for the first time the scale of a place that would have such a porch hit her. The door awaited. An iron knocker with a cherubic child's face greeted her.

"Well?" Christine's voice urged her on. _So impatient!_

Gia raised the iron knocker and let it fall. It landed with a heavy, dull thud that ought to have echoed, but the noise seemed instead to vanish inside, as if the house was filled floor to ceiling with heavy cloth.

Gia, framed in Christine's blinding lights, turned and shrugged. On a whim she tried the door-handle, and found to her surprise that it turned easily. The door seemed almost to fall smoothly open, pulling the handle from her hands. The hinges did not creak.

Christine's lights caught the entry hall, and it was as stately as any house Gia had ever seen. A tall central stairway dominated the room, with closed double doors on either side leading off deeper into the mansion. Gia used her flashlight and quickly found a heavy-duty switch, old fashioned and sturdy like everything else in the place.

The lights came on. Incredibly, not a single bulb had burned out. No cobwebs had formed. The house was a trifle dusty perhaps, the air a little stagnant and suffocating, and the wood paneling dark and heavy. She could see and feel the weight of age and time. But the place was luxurious with everything sensibly in its place.

Gia couldn't help but smile her twisted smile down to Christine. She gave the car a thumbs-up.

"Come get your food, silly." Christine chided. Gia descended the stairs and took the white plastic sacks filled with boxes from the passenger foot well.

She reached the door again to find that it had already shut. _Odd! The way it seemed to fall in I'd expect the door to stay ajar. _It opened again easily enough.

"You go have yourself a nice rest." With no further comment, the Fury turned and pulled away from the house. Gia watched Christine's taillights a little forlornly as she reached the turn. Then thick shrubbery hid her away in the moonless night.

"Well, here I am." Gia said into the house. She shut the door behind her and stared into the entry hall. Just as a precaution she tried the door again. It opened easily in her hands, revealing stark blackness outside. She let go of the handle, and it stayed ajar.

The silence was deafening. No crickets. No breeze. By the hanging lamps, not quite a chandelier, Gia could see the room more clearly. There was, if anything, an overwhelming excess of detail, with patterns of velvet on the wallpaper and ornate carving on the wood. The effect was a little overpowering.

_I wonder if anyone else is here? With the light turned on like this I certainly announced myself. What if there are squatters?_ But the perfect way the house was ordered and the light coat of undisturbed dust on the polished floor reassured her. Certainly it was awkward, even frightening, to find oneself deposited in a big strange deserted house in the middle of the night. But she was a grown-up now, and grown-ups didn't let their imaginations run away with them, no indeed!

_It's so quiet!_ The silence alone was a kind of aural assault. _Well, upstairs is the most likely place to find beds. _But somehow Gia couldn't make herself go far away from the front door. It was senseless, because out there was cold void and in here was warmth and light. _But still..._

_...why would such a big, luxurious home be abandoned?_ A voice inside her head howled.

_Click!_ The front door had shut neatly again on its own.

The first door to the left led to a comparatively little sitting room, _if anything in this house may be called "little." _Gia found, to her immense satisfaction, a couch among the chairs. _I've been keeping Christine's weird nocturnal schedule. Can I still sleep at night?_ The dreadful pounding in her head and the weakness in her knees reassured her of that point, at least.

She put the rustling plastic bag of food at the foot of the sofa. O_h very clever, Gia! Attract a bear with that smell. Nothing for it, though._

The curtains were closed. Gia peeked through them, and found a big bay window and the vast darkness outside. _Something from outside could get in. _But the panes were undamaged and must have stood there undamaged for years. _Of course, I could also theoretically get out, couldn't I?_ Still, she was grateful for the curtains that hid her from anything that might peek in at her.

_Wish I had a gun or something. Anything._

She returned to the entry hall and flicked off the light. Then she turned on her flashlight and resolutely doused the drawing room's lights too. _Grown-ups aren't afraid of the dark. I'm attracting unwanted attention with these lights. If anyone's here, I don't wanna meet 'em until the sun comes up._

So Gia curled up on the couch, hugging herself against the slight chill and clutching her flashlight, until she at last turned it off too.

Complete, cave-like darkness descended upon her. It was a darkness she could feel. Inky. Impenetrable. And silence, unbroken. _Even the oldest houses make little creaks in the night. The day's heat causes thermal expansion and contraction. Shouldn't there be animals rustling about outside? Mice? Bats squeaking?_

But the only sound was the rhythmic throbbing of Gia's head. So she closed her eyes and waited in the darkness for sleep.

_...Maybe I'm not a grown-up? I do not like it here, Christine. What were you thinking? I don't feel safe here in this strange silent house..._

_G_ia slept. She did not dream.

* * *

_**Some places never change**_.

* * *

Gia awoke, stretched, smacked her lips and yawned hugely. Daylight was peeking in around the window's heavy curtain. She sat up.

_Morning? What time? I really slept hard. I slept myself out but I don't feel rested. Or is that I rested but I didn't really sleep? Gah, wake up!_ She tossed aside the warm quilt and got up to open the curtains.

Sunlight reached into the thick pine forest and found the road leading up to the house. Grass was peeking up through the cobblestones, but everything looked perfectly normal and safe. _Amazing how sunlight can make a place so much less spooky. Thank goodness! And my head's stopped pounding._

She turned to examine her room by the light the bay window granted. The air was stuffy. The chairs were covered in plush leather as she remembered. There were tables and a little bar in back for serving drinks. The sofa she'd slept on was red velvet, with a purple knitted quilt lying crumpled over it. _It's a perfect little room for guests to wait comfortably until somebody comes to receive them, except this little room is bigger than most people's houses. Mmm... not awake yet. I'd sure like some coffee._

_I'll need to fold that quilt. Can't leave the place untidy, whoever gave it to me wouldn't apprec– _Gia stuffed a hand into her mouth to stop the scream. _Where did that quilt come from I didn't have that last night!_

Someone had found her sleeping last night. There was somebody else here– _who obviously doesn't mean you any harm at all or you'd be dead right now, you stupid, silly girl!_

Gia laughed at herself. She let her breathing return to normal and the adrenaline drain out of her system. "Some nice old granny lives here and found me and put that over me," she scolded herself aloud. _And it was a really nice, hospitable thing to do so get a hold of yourself!_

She set about folding the mysterious quilt and left it on top of the sofa. Her food was missing! She felt a little panic until a quick search of the room revealed a mini-refrigerator behind the bar, and her bag of food safely stuffed in it. _Nice! Let's go find our host._

Gia made a quick foray and soon found a kitchen. It was in perfect order. But it had no less than five doors, one leading outside to a terrace. Gia retreated back to the little receiving room and began exploring the shelves and drawers for pen and paper. _Gonna need a map!_

Soon equipped with a pen and legal pad, she began exploring in earnest. It took hours before she had finished a round of the interior and found her way back to the kitchen. She had discovered several curious facts about her holiday abode.

The veranda actually wrapped around the mansion, though dividers and breaks prevented one from using it as a shortcut anywhere.

The manse itself was nestled in a valley high in the hills. Trees and thick foliage grew almost right up to the veranda. Cozy, almost smothering.

There were plenty of rooms inside the rough "ring" of exterior rooms. These had no windows nor natural light at all.

Everything was in perfect order. The faucets, after a spurt of dark stagnant water, ran clear, icy cold and scalding hot. Light switches by the doors invariably gave a slightly dim but adequate view of the handsomely furnished rooms. Though she carried her flashlight like a talisman, it saw no use.

Her personal map made precious little sense. It might take her a week just to figure her way around. And that was just the first floor! She hadn't even tried going upstairs yet.

And finally, she was alone. Completely. This enormous nest that could house an entire clan comfortably was utterly derelict.

_Nonsensical! What the hell is this place?_ Though her headache was gone, her sense of uneasiness continued unabated.

Highlights of her tour were a central dining room with a long table and matching long mirrors, a stone turret used as a library with a tall metal spiral staircase, a game room that made Gia positively pine for company, and a neglected greenhouse dominated by a massive familial statue done up in a self-consciously classical style.

_I'm no art critic, but that sculpture's definitely not winning any awards._

Gia had heard of big, rambling hulks like this before - wealthy men making opulent, lifeless "country houses," monuments to themselves and to bad taste, then failing to fill them with laughing progeny. This was simply an older specimen of the type built by someone with the initials "H.C." by the examples left in the woodwork.

Gia used the kitchen to heat up a meal, ate silently, then felt compelled either by her operation or perhaps by the house itself to tidy up afterward.

_I am so lonely I could scream. I'm gonna scream!_

Gia was startled to see darkness falling outside the kitchen window. Had she slept even later than she expected, or had her explorations taken so long? No, there was a large sturdy clock in the kitchen that read a quarter to six. _Between the trees and the hills, it just gets dark here early._ She sat back down at the plain wooden kitchen table.

_If I scream here, no one will hear._ The morbid thought came to her unbidden, and filled her with such a horrid sense of isolation that she felt she might bolt for the front door, and run the six miles back to that flyspeck town and the diner and humanity.

_No, it's getting dark. I've had it! Tomorrow morning I'll set off and I'll do it in about two hours walk. Christine, did you honestly think I'd find this restful? Are you insane?_

"It's a murderous talking car, Gia; what do you think? And by the way you're talking to yourself now. Guh!" She buried her face in her hands. _Go to bed. Find a real bed and sleep and get the hell out of here tomorrow morning before you completely flip out!_

Gia climbed the stairs for the first time. After all the complications the simple straight hallway was something of a relief. She opened the first door on the left.

_Blue. Lots of blue. _As with every room in the house, the sheer quantity of details overwhelmed her. Patterns on the carpet, completely different ones on the bed's comforter, a half-canopy, lamps, a baroque chair... all in blue and somehow managing to clash and to feel smothering and cold and dismal. _But there's a bed._ And she flopped down on it. _Okay, get some sleep and bright and early tomorrow morning–_

Gia sat up in alarm just as the door opened and a woman entered. The stranger put her hands up to her mouth and shrieked, provoking an identical reaction from Gia.

After a moment the woman said, "Oh! Oh, you gave me a fright."

"Yeah," Gia agreed. "Wow."

"What are you doing on my bed?"

Gia gaped. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know the room was occupied." She jumped up immediately.

"For that matter, what are you doing in my house?"

"Oh, it's your house. Hi. I'm so sorry," she repeated. "I was dropped off here by someone who said it was deserted."

"Well it is. I mean... I'm the caretaker. Nell."

"My name's Gia. I'm sorry to intrude. Pleased to meet you."

"Oh! You... you're not intruding, dear," Nell said. "You seem nice. And it's been a long time since I had any company here."

Nell was a smallish, frail-looking woman just approaching middle age. Her pale gold hair was harshly swept back into a bun. Her shoulders hunched forward. She was exactly the sort of person people meant when they called someone "mousy."

"I'm embarrassed," Gia admitted. "My uhm... friend said this would be a good place to recuperate in peace. She wasn't wrong there. I've never seen a place that was so quiet."

Nell nodded. "You have a lady-friend?"

"Oh... yes." How to explain this? _Oh, why not the truth? _"Christine. I'm her driver."

"Recuperate?"

"I had an operation recently."

"You poor dear! Why don't you take the next room? We can share the bathroom and that way I can help tend to you if you need it." She waved Gia over to the door.

"What a sweetie!" Gia said. "Were you the one who gave me the quilt earlier?"

The bathroom, of all places, featured the first skylight she'd seen, and a welcome sight it was after all the enclosed spaces. The amenities were very old fashioned indeed, and somehow failed to charm Gia with any sort of nostalgia. Rather they depressed and vaguely annoyed her.

Nell nodded. "It gets cold here at night, in the dark. I went back down to the sitting room but you'd already gone. I've been looking for you ever since. When I didn't find you I assumed you'd just stopped to rest for the night and moved on."

Gia laughed. "I gave myself the grand tour and got lost. We probably just missed each other several times."

The adjoining room was in essence identical, but done up in a dull, drab green. _I've seen worse, but who decorated this place?_

"It's not exactly cheerful," Nell said, as if reading her mind. "but the bed's comfy. And yes, it's easy to get lost here, until you're used to it."

"You're being very kind. Here I just let myself in and you're being so hospitable." _Nell's very sensible and grown-up, but it's still kinda weird. But then, my whole life's been weird for a while._

"It's so rare I get any company at all! I'm glad you came, Gia. Would you stay up with me for a little while? It's been a long time since I had a nice chat with someone."

"Don't you stay in town?" Gia asked, surprised.

"Oh no, I live here. The caretaker before me, Mrs. Dudley, she stayed in town. But I like it here. It's my home, the only one I have. It does get lonesome, though."

Suddenly a chilling picture of Nell's life here came to Gia – a woman with no other means hired by some wealthy family to keep the place up, and her fussing and dithering about the place all alone while the years passed her by. _You don't suppose she's an agoraphobe?_

"It seems so sad, I mean... staying here all alone."

"Oh, yes. Perfectly dreadful." She sat in a chair as Gia sat on the bed. "But this is my home now. How long will you be staying here?"

The question took Gia aback. "Uhm... until Christine comes to pick me up. I don't honestly know how long that'll be."

"Well let's hope it's a while," Nell said with a smile. "Why don't you tell me about this 'operation?'"

Gia decided letting people know how easily she could be bossed about would be very unwise, and she of course deduced that such a lonesome soul would happily gabble until sunrise. "I'd love to, but maybe after a bit of rest." _Ever since that fright, my head's starting to pound again._ She rubbed the back of her head and winced.

"Perhaps I could make you some warm tea before bed?"

"Oh thanks, but I ate dinner in the kitchen just before we met."

Nell got up and smiled. "Then you can join me there tomorrow morning. I have breakfast ready at nine."

"G'night," Gia said happily, and even she could tell it was real and unforced, not her usual automatic cheer. The door closed, and Gia felt the silence and the loneliness descend upon her again. She briefly regretted saying good night to Nell so soon.

_Well, now everything's perfect. I have Nellie to keep me company and nurse me back to health, in this superbly luxurious antique of a house. _She stripped off her leather jacket and black jeans and went to the light switch. _Christine, you're more clever than I thought. _In the sudden, cavernous darkness Gia padded hastily in her socks back to the bed and jumped under the sheets. They were cold at first and she shivered.

Gia's last thought before sleep overtook her was,_ it seems out of character for her to do something so kind. You don't suppose she's got some underhanded scheme?_

* * *

_Who's talking?_

Gia stirred in her bed, waking from a dreamless sleep. A conversation was taking place nearby. Her eyes flitted open. _Those are male voices. One sounds old. Is somebody here besides Nell?_

_Laughing_. Gia immediately felt the cold. Intense, bone-chilling cold all around her in the dark. Even the coverlet that should still carry her own warmth felt frosty. _How is that possible? _Gia sat up, alarmed, fully awake now. The voice was that of a creaky old man... and then another, deeper one. _An argument?_

"Nell...?" Gia said into the darkness.

BOOM! Gia's hands flew to her cheeks in alarm. It sounded like someone had dropped a bowling ball onto the wood floor. And just as the echoes died away, another. Another!

Gia sat in her bed, trembling from the cold, thunderstruck and helpless against the noise. _It's somewhere outside in the hall!_

Silence again. _I'm getting up and I'm going into Nell's room. I'm getting up and going to Nell's room_ but her body refused to move. She just sat there shivering. Silence.

_Jacket! _She'd feel safer wearing some protection. Gia grabbed her jeans and shoved her legs into them and her feet into her sneakers in scant seconds, and was just reaching for her coat when BOOM! again and Gia's body jolted to a standing position. She ran to the bathroom door. She scrambled blind through the unlit room and opened the next door.

Gia could barely see Nell – chilling portrait! – with the blanket pulled almost over her head, spectral herself. She was sitting on her bed shaking, her eyes wild.

"It's started again," she said in a hissing whisper. Gia scrambled onto the bed alongside her and hugged her in her terror.

"What? What is it?" Gia whimpered.

"I don't know. It sometimes happens here. In the night. In the dark. I don't—" Nell's whisper was cut off by the thunderous clatter banging on the room's door. Gia thought she actually saw the door shake and bulge from the impact, but it being dark, it might have been her eyes tricking her. The doorknob rattled as someone or something tried it. Then... silence.

The pair shivered together in the hush. Then, "Nell, you've heard _that _before and you don't know what it is... and you stay here?" It seemed to Gia utter lunacy.

"I don't have any other home," Nell whined miserably.

"Oh, I'm out of here," Gia whispered. "I'm gone. I am so out of here - right now!"

Then a horrid thought occurred to Gia. _I didn't lock my door. I didn't lock my door or the bathroom door and that leads right in here! _Her eyes darted up to the bathroom door, which had unsurprisingly shut by itself behind her. She looked up just in time to see—

_The door knob's turning it's in the bathroom and the door knob's turning it's turning! _A voice in her head gibbered idiotically at her. Gia jumped up and rushed to the hallway door.

"No! Don't open the door!" Nell pleaded, and Gia felt something go taut in her head like a leash and she froze. _Oh damn!_ She couldn't disobey _but it's coming through the bathroom run! _And Gia howled in helpless terror for a long frozen moment until she saw, feeling strangely disembodied, her hand turning the doorknob and her arms yanking open the door.

Dark emptiness waited for her in the hallway. Gia barreled out as fast as she could run. She reached the stairway and leaped down, taking three at a time recklessly until she heard—

"Gia no don't leave me alone! Please!" from the room behind her. Her own legs locked up beneath her and Gia toppled down the final steps to the floor and landed with a jarring thud.

She picked herself up carefully, horrified that some unseen unimaginable thing could even now be standing at the top of the stairs leering down at her. _Don't look back don't just get up get up and run! _Gia got up on unsteady legs and stumbled for the front door.

"Don't leave meeeee!"

_Nell! For pity's sake stop that! _Of course, some still-sensible part of Gia's brain knew even then that Nell had no idea about the operation and didn't realize what her commands were doing to her. Gia stood frozen before the door, hand half-raised to grasp the doorknob. Her mouth opened to scream but no sound came out.

_BOOM!_

Now Gia howled and yanked open the door. She was abruptly blinded by horrific, painful white light. The world had gone insane, with light and shadow changing places and Gia hurtling forward, her ears filled with a dreadful screeching and her eyes hurting as badly as her head, through the veranda and – POW! Something hit her and sent her reeling backward onto what felt like cold dirt.

Gia lay there, curled up in a trembling ball of pain and fear. Then she heard...

"Now that's tempting fate! What is wrong with you, girl? You tryin' to get yourself killed?"

_Christine...?_

It took a moment for the world to stop spinning. Then, slowly, Gia rose up to a kneeling position, sore all over. Her thighs throbbed where Christine's bumper had hit and she desperately rubbed at them to ease the pain. The muscles were already starting to swell.

"Christine? Is that you? Am I glad to see you!" Gia rubbed the purple haze out of her eyes and beheld the car, who thoughtfully killed the headlights for her.

"You just about jumped under my tires, y'know. What's got into you?"

Gia blinked. She was standing just outside the veranda. Christine was idling at almost the same spot she'd parked in earlier. It was Christine's headlights that had lit the world crazily as she exited the house. The sky overhead was just showing the strange pale white that preceded dawn.

"Some rest home," Gia muttered. She turned to face the house.

She saw it for the first time, and exhaled slowly. The house was massive, ornate, a tangle of towers and gables that filled her vision completely. It wasn't any one detail she saw, but the whole felt gaunt, narrow, dour. It reminded Gia of the stiff nurse in her tight white canvas dress mouthing in businesslike tones, "now this won't hurt a bit."

_Vile!_ The word came into her head all on its own._ This place isn't fit for humans to live in. Christine... you bitch!_

"Get me out of here."

"You sure? You look a mess."

"Yeah, I'm sure!" Gia growled. She'd left food and her flashlight inside. She was just lucky she wasn't walking around in her underwear. _I am not going back in there, no way not ever!_

Gia opened the driver's side door and stopped. _I just escaped one trap... am I trading it for another?_ But after the moment's hesitation she fell into the seat and closed the heavy metal door behind her.

She could see the house through the windshield, staring down at her. _It sees me! _Her hands were shaking as she turned the car about. Her head throbbed worse than ever.

"You better let me," Christine said. "I'm not in the mood to get intimate with any trees 'round here." So Gia sank into the leather seats with gratitude and passively watched the mansion recede in the rear view mirror.

Inside, morning sunlight peeked into the outer rooms and found the antique luxuries and trappings of a bygone age, unchanged by years uncounted and perhaps unchangeable by countless more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House.

...and whatever walked there, walked alone.

.


	3. Chapter 3

"Do you believe in good and evil?"

The voice came through the speakers of an old-fashioned, lumbering automobile dubbed a Plymouth Fury. The voice was female, and answered to Christine.

The voice startled Gia out of a semi-doze. Gia was a sweet-natured young woman with black hair that grew wild about her head, because she'd been shaved bald a few months ago. The same surgery that gave her the strange hairdo also gave her a strange smile, and made her Christine's compliant and long-suffering perfect match.

Ever since the pair's "morning" just before the sun set, they'd driven in silence, passing through night-shrouded coastal towns that all looked equally dull and sad. Gia had become so used to following the heads-up display reflected from the windshield that she barely even noticed it anymore. And Christine's voice from the speakers startled her out of her state.

"Hmm?" Gia answered.

"Tell me true child... d'you believe in good 'n evil?"

"Why does that question sound particularly ominous coming from you?" Gia asked back, provoking a trilling little laugh from Christine.

"I don't, not really. My parents certainly did. But I always thought there are only... wise and unwise acts. Do something foolish and mean and it will catch up to you. But there's nothing supernatural about that. 'Karma' is just a fancy name we have for the fact that what goes around comes around."

"So how about human beings? Are they good or evil?"

"We're just smart animals. Grass grows, cows eat grass, we eat cows. We die; grass grows."

"Doubt the cows are real happy about that."

"Maybe to them we're evil. But that's the way the world is."

"All very zen, I'm sure." Christine snarked. "So am I evil?"

_Tread carefully Gia,_ she thought to herself. "You do very spiteful things whenever somebody crosses you. Does that make you evil?"

The sultry voice chuckled as if at some private joke, then lapsed into thoughtful silence again.

* * *

_**Trial By Fire**_

* * *

_** "**_Stick it in about halfway and twist," sergeant LeBay instructed.

Sometimes Christine let Gia have some company. Tonight a hard, battered military man sat in the passenger seat, instructing her on how to use a bayonet.

"Now here's the best part," LeBay said with a wink. "You keep some kinda weapon, like a gun or somethin', where people can find it. So that way they think they're safe. Now this..." Here LeBay held up a thin, narrow switchblade with a bit of white string tied to it. "you stuff this up your pussy. Keep it there so you'll always have it. Tell folks you got the monthlies if'n it comes up."

_Such a crude old man_, Gia thought.

Gia pulled over and, as always, did as she was told, though she wrapped the knife in a thick scrap of cloth first. She dimly sensed her modesty should be offended by LeBay's leer, but since she was a grown-up now, there was nothing she could do about it.

"Ow! It's really uncomfortable," Gia told him as she finished and set the car moving again.

LeBay laughed the rough, scratchy laugh of an old man.

"'Uncomfortable?' Hoo! Well you lissen here! You listen to ol' Rollie or you're gonna find out what uncomfortable _really_ means!" The last words he shouted into her face. Gia felt a stinking wave of hot whiskey-breath pass her.

It was at that moment she noticed a set of red and blue lights flashing in the rear-view mirror. She tensed. She glanced over to the passenger seat, but LeBay had vanished.

"Cops behind. You want me to outrun 'em?"

Gia dearly hoped Christine would agree, for everybody's sake. There was no doubt the muscle-car could escape. There was also no doubt the policemen were roadkill if Christine so chose.

Instead the unexpected happened - the Fury's engine sputtered and died.

"Christine?" Gia shouted in confusion. She shifted the gears and twisted the key and pumped the gas, but the car remained inert. The patrol car halted just behind, its headlamps bathing the Fury's interior with stark yellow light. Two men with badges and dark uniforms exited.

"Christine, what are you doing?" Gia hissed angrily, but there was no answer, and for the first time she felt herself alone and abandoned inside the car. Christine and whatever uneasy ghosts she carried with her had all taken a powder.

The cops' footsteps crunched in the road's gravel. Gia heard a knock on the window. She rolled it down. A blinding flashlight hid the policeman's features from her.

"Drivers' license, registration and proof of insurance," the man commanded.

"Uhh..." Gia stammered. Being a grown-up, she automatically searched around the glove compartment in the absurd hope that they would somehow magically materialize.

"I'm sorry, officer. I don't have any of those things."

"Step out of the car. And where's your passenger?"

"Passenger?" Gia asked as she opened the door and stood. The pair of policemen waved their flashlights around the car ineffectually. "I was driving alone."

"Open the trunk."

Gia took the keys and opened the trunk. As she was pocketing the keyring one of the cops snatched it right out of her hand. "I'll take that." His partner rummaged about the trunk.

"In this state," the first policeman continued in a flat voice, "it's illegal to operate a motor vehicle without a license. We'll have to take you in."

"I understand," Gia said with her usual quietly upbeat tone.

Both cops stiffened. They looked at each other, then both flashlights shone in her face again. She blinked and shielded her eyes.

"Miss, are you on drugs?"

"No, of course not. Why?"

"That smile of yours..."

"What about it?" If they demanded an explanation Gia would be compelled to explain. But until then she decided she'd much rather not.

"What's this?" the other policeman held up a cylinder with nozzle. "Huh. Pepper spray. You have a license for this, miss?"

"No." Indeed, it was the first time she'd seen it.

"We'll have to impound it," and he shut the trunk with a decisive _whump._

_Huh... "that way they think they're safe." A message? What've you thrown me into this time?_ The police dug their fingers into her arms and led her away. Gia kicked one of Christine's tires in passing.

As she did so, the AV system clicked on and played a song. Gia was dropped onto the pavement and both policemen whirled, hands on holsters, only to find themselves confronted with "Wake Up, Little Susie."

The AV system shut off as quickly as it started.

_Uh huh! "Wake up." Cute._ Gia brushed herself off and said, "bad fuse. She does that sometimes."

"She?"

"Car's a lady; can'cha tell?"

"Right." Again, their hard fingers latched onto her like serpents with lockjaw and they led her to the squad car without further ado.

* * *

Gia sat in the back seat of the car, staring at the backs of the policemen's heads through the black grill. In such a circumstance it was normal for one to be frightened and vigilant. Then there were the warnings Christine and Roland had given her.

_Old model car, not as old as Christine but still old. Nothing about the cops that looks unusual. Navy blue uniforms. The driver's name tag says 'Shipley.'_

"Hey, what about my car?"

"We'll send someone to collect it in the morning."

"Where are we going?"

"The station."

A sign flashed by, Gia barely noticed it in time. She closed her eyes and read by the after-image, "Zachry, pop. 67."

"So is that name short for 'Zachariah?'" Gia asked.

No answer.

"You're missing an apostrophe if so."

"That sign's older than I am," officer Shipley barked, sounding more than a little offended.

"Lot of empty houses for just sixty seven people," Gia commented.

"Population's gone up and down a little. We don't change the sign. Sentimental value."

Gia stared out the window. She could sense it: _the lights aren't just out... those houses are abandoned. Look at the lawns._ Tall weeds rushed by, briefly illuminated by the headlights. _Something's very, very wrong here._ She was scared; Gia could feel cold sweat on her palms.

_Oh, damn you to hell, Christine!_

The car stopped. "Get out."

There were no lights on anywhere, and Gia only saw the policemen as silhouettes against the vivid starlight as she stood up. "This is the station?"

"Come on," officer Shipley said.

The pair took Gia firmly into a dark building. But she saw no peeling paint or other signs of decrepitude. Her head was on high alert and all her senses on overdrive.

_But how long can I keep it up? And what is going on here? If these aren't real policemen I'm in serious trouble. But if they are and I try to resist... Christine **–** I hate you!_

The interior of the station looked a little more encouraging: cracked tile, desk, bench, all suitably beaten up. Now that she had a better look at officers Shipley and Carey, she could see they were swarthy men, surprisingly lean for their jobs, and their uniforms looked baggy and loose on them.

_Okay, it's just possible these aren't real cops. Do not volunteer anything. Keep your mouth shut._ Gia prayed that they'd never heard of the operation she'd undergone, because it would compel her to obey whatever they commanded of her, however unreasonable.

Shipley took a seat behind the desk, and motioned her to have a seat on the bench.

"Single, young lady?" He asked.

"Yes."

"Where are your parents?"

"They're dead," she heard herself say before she could stop it. _The operation'll be the death of me!_ She added quickly before he could ask, "they died in a car accident." _Heaven help me if they start asking about Christine!_

"Other relatives?"

"None I've ever met."

Gia's eyes were drawn up to a picture hanging on the wall, of a ship at sea. The captain was a particularly nasty-looking fellow with a long, scraggly black beard.

"Friends in the state?"

"No."

"Employment?"

"Courier."

The officer looked up. "What are you shipping?"

"Nothing today."

"We'll search your car. You better tell the truth."

"It's the truth." It was too; they'd dropped off Christine's last shipment the night before, and she hadn't asked what they were carrying.

"So you're here on business?"

"Yes."

_I do not like the pattern I'm seeing in these questions._ "What does this have to do with my license?"

"Just routine. You'll have to appear before the judge tomorrow morning. Until then, you'll be staying here."

He got up and reached for his keys.

"What are the penalties for driving without a license here?" Gia ventured.

"That's for the judge to decide."

"What's the law say it is?"

"We do things a little differently here in Zachry."

_...yeah._ "Aren't you uhm..." Gia ventured, "...going to ask if my license was revoked or suspended?"

The officer stopped, momentarily nonplussed. "...well?"

"Well what?"

Officer Shipley scowled. "Was it suspended or revoked?"

_Uh huh! He wasn't even going to ask; he doesn't give a damn about it. He's not for real. I hate you Christine, but thanks for the warning._

"Neither. It's still in my parents' truck. It's valid, for cars and commercial trucks both. But I no longer have it with me. I'm sure that you can check it. Would you like the license number?"

"Yes."

Gia wrote down the number, just as the promptings of her operation demanded. Then on a whim she added a few, and a letter for good measure. _If he's for real, he'll see that and ask about it._

The officer accepted the number without comment. At that moment his counterpart returned and the pair grabbed Gia by the arms again and led her to a jail cell. She entered without resistance. _The moment will come, Gia. Watch for the moment._ But she could feel sweat dripping from her armpits; she was good and scared now.

_Clank!_ The cell door closed behind her. Gia looked around at the dismal little chamber, toilet without seat, sink, bunk with a thin mattress, just before the lights went out and she was plunged into darkness.

She stood there, breathing shallowly, waiting for something – anything! – to happen. But nothing did. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could dimly see her surroundings again. She sat on the bunk.

_Okay. They're not for real. What's going on? Are they car thieves? I hope so... imagine a car thief stealing Christine?_ She briefly entertained herself with visions of smug criminals feeling the car come alive around them, just before she crushed them to death or deliberately careened into something and sent them through the windshield.

_What do they want from me? Money? They haven't asked me for money. Maybe I don't have enough information yet._

Gia lay down on the hard cot, so different from the warm cushy leather of Christine's back seat. _Am I actually starting to think of that damned car as home...?_

She could feel the discomfort of the object she was concealing inside herself, and observed the irony that it now felt so reassuring.

* * *

Gia awoke as the night sky was blanching. The cell had not improved since she saw it last, and it sent her blood pressure up again. Nervous, she did some calisthenics to shake off sleep and burn off a burst of nervous energy.

Then she heard the ominous sound of footsteps, rubber soles on concrete, and saw Carey arrive with breakfast.

"Step away from the bars," he said.

As always, Gia felt the compulsion to obey. But she managed to say, "Oh c'mon! Do I look dangerous?" Unfortunately, the cop was having none of it. He put a breakfast tray on the bunk and closed the cell door without taking his dark eyes off of her.

_What the heck...?_ Breakfast was amazing! A trio of fried eggs, toast, pancakes, hash browns, a carafe of orange juice... strawberries in cream...! The smell immediately set Gia's mouth watering.

There was only one possible reason they'd serve such a fine meal. _Think a girl like me's never heard of a date-rape drug?_

"You... shitters!" she hissed viciously. Then Gia stopped, surprised to hear herself using Christine's pet epithet.

But the anger was useful. It gave her the will she needed to flush this amazing breakfast down the toilet. She swished a little of the egg around in her mouth first so she'd have it on her breath.

Soon enough, the cop returned. "Done?"

"Yup," Gia smiled. "But I'm feeling kinda sleepy now." She was delighted that with an effort she could still lie by omission, at least when she wasn't asked a direct question. She was rapidly learning the limits of her new existence.

The officer unlocked the door. "Come with me."

"Where to?" Gia said airily. The operation helped keep her voice deceptively cheerful and bright.

"The judge is sick. We're taking you up to his home to hear your case." The line sounded well rehearsed.

They exited the station to find Shipley waiting by the squad car. Gia took a look around... decrepit coastal town, perhaps a fishing village. The view of the ocean was pleasant and she could hear gulls squawking over its hiss. _Always liked that sound._

"I told you, I have a valid driver's license. All you need to do is call_**–**_"

"That'd be fine if we had phone lines in Zachry."

_They just keep throwing up obstacles, don't they?_ Gia sat down in the back of the police car again.

_Gia, you don't want to wait around until the punchline of this joke. You've got to do something!_ She looked around helplessly at the cage-like interior of the police car. _When I get out. If I can just manage a moment's privacy to pull the knife._

"Uhm..." she said quietly, "I don't think breakfast agreed with me. How far are we going?"

The police looked at each other, concerned. "Are you sick?"

"I'm gonna be, and I'd hate to make a mess in your car."

"It's not far," the policeman smiled reassuringly.

They made a turn past a church, whose sign read, "Barbecue Tonite," and started the climb uphill.

_What if I'm wrong?_ Gia rubbed sweat from her palms. _Attacking policemen? Is Christine trying to trick you?_

_Gia, you are not wrong! Now do something or**–**_

_"...or you're gonna find out what uncomfortable really means!"_ LeBay's words reverberated in her head. She reached down and loosened the belt on her black jeans.

"So who was Zachary anyway?"

"Zachry," Carey corrected. "Sea captain."

"Whaled in the South Seas," Shipley added. "And we're here."

The car stopped in front of a house, three gray stories of it, Colonial style. It was passably well-kept for such an old house, topped with a tall brick chimney.

Without a word, the policemen opened the door for her. Gia sat in the car, just breathing.

_Gia, you may not live to see ten more minutes. Are you really going to do this?_

"Miss?"

_Look, if you die you escape the operation. You escape Christine and whatever hell she plans to drop you off in next week. You have nothing to lose. Now, do what you must!_

"Miss!"

"I'm not feeling well at all...!" Gia said as she got out of the squad car. She was feeling upset enough that it was no lie, and the crossed wires in her head didn't countermand it. _As if these guys weren't bad enough, I gotta worry about my own brain betraying me too?_

The officers knocked on the door, and a tall, elderly woman with dark skin and a pouf of gray hair answered. "Come in," she said. And Gia felt the operation kick in, forcing her legs to move her through the threshold.

The interior was somewhat dim and cluttered, with another of those maritime portraits hanging from the walls. Gia didn't take time to look around. The police were behind her, and only this matron in front.

"Bathroom!" she blurted and rushed forward.

The policemen were so surprised they missed the chance to snatch for her. Gia was in another room with the door closed just as one of them yelled, "Hold it!" Gia felt her legs stiffen under her as the command took hold.

She was in a storage closet of some sort, not a bathroom. No lock on the doorknob and there was a window she might— _no time!_ She forced her hand down into her pants and yanked the pull-string, clenching her teeth as the hard metal shape came out.

At that moment the door smashed open, sending Gia reeling to the floor. But her hand held to the knife with a death-grip.

_No cop would do that!_ Her mind chattered to itself.

One of them, she couldn't see which in the dim light, stood over her. "Ow, that hurt!" Gia scolded from the floor, almost in tears. "Jeez, I think I hurt something. What is your problem, mister?"

He reached down to help her up. She accepted the hand. She pushed the button and_**–**_

"Stick it in about halfway and twist," LeBay commanded in her mind. Gia obeyed.

The policeman howled. But if LeBay was good as his word, the man would bleed out in seconds. He was no longer relevant. Gia darted past him through the door back into the room. The elderly woman was there.

For an instant, Gia hesitated. Killing an old woman wasn't what she'd envisioned. But terror drove her knife forward and the woman shrieked and bucked, impaled.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the other policeman returning at the sound of the crone's scream. _He must have been moving to cut me off at the window! _And he held a revolver. Gia panicked and dashed out the front door.

–right into the open space of the driveway. A precipice beyond. There was nowhere to hide. Gia continued forward. Whatever lay beyond that cliff was as good as waiting to get shot.

Her suicide run was interrupted by a horrid screeching, roaring noise. Gia glanced over her shoulder just in time to see a familiar mass of red metal connect perfectly with the running policeman.

Hat, pistol and policeman spun end-over-end right off the cliff. The car's front tires actually went over before it halted.

"Eight," Christine said merrily. "I hafta take points off for that landing." She reversed and yanked herself away from the chasm.

Gia stood thunderstruck for a long moment, mouth dangling open and panting, dripping knife hanging from a limp arm. Then _**–**_ she detonated!

"You _bitch!_" Gia bellowed, and she beat on the car's fender with both hands, denting the metal slightly. "I cannot believe you just left me here with these crazies!"

Christine laughed that particular laugh that sent chills down Gia's spine, the wicked laugh of those who savor the suffering of others. "I've been watching over you. You ought'a be more polite considering I just saved your life."

"You put me in danger in the first place!" Gia shouted, outraged.

"There is that. Hey, before we go I think you should have a look in there."

"Why?"

"You wanna make sure you were right, don'cha? I mean, take a good look at your right hand."

Gia did, and saw the blood-coated knife, and the gore on her own skin. Abruptly she felt faint. She staggered and put her other hand on the car to keep from falling.

"I... I killed them." She took a moment to feel the weight of it. It was the sort of thing that changed her very identity. _I'm a killer now!_

"Sure did," Christine crooned proudly. "Now before you throw another tantrum, go look inside."

The command took hold, just as Christine knew it would. Gia walked mechanically back into the house.

The room was cluttered, messy. Piles of old junk lying on the floor, with trails cut in-between leading to the various rooms. _How do people live like this?_

Her eyes were drawn to the picture, a portrait of a sea-going crew that could definitively be called "scurvy." The old, gnarly-haired pirate in the middle that she'd come to know as Zachry had his arm around the waist of a weird, savage-looking dark-skinned woman with her teeth filed to points.

_Good God!_ A dreadful thought occured to her, and cold shock descended like an icy shroud. She continued her search, listlessly, and soon enough she found it.

The room looked like a vault, except it had perforated sheet metal on the floor. A rotating locking mechanism would seal it shut. There were all manner of crude scratches on the interior bluing of the thick metal door.

Hidden behind a drapery she found the simple controls: a dial with temperatures on it, and a timer.

* * *

_**Barbecue Tonite.**_

* * *

Gia entered the car and drove it away without a word, still in shock, and still so furious she could only have uttered a fierce stream of invective anyway. For her own perverse reasons, Christine chose the moment to play some nonsense called "Wooly Bully."

"Now I know you're mad hun," the voice finally said. "But before you start yelling, answer me some questions."

"Yes?" Gia snapped.

"If you hadn't been warned, where would you be right now?"

"Cooking," she admitted.

"Yup. But I _did_ warn you. Now, how many travelers do you suppose this town's caught? You wanna guess how old this place is? Oh! Turn right here."

"What's your point Christine?" Gia spat.

"Park it here. I want you to just look over there in front of us."

Gia halted the car. She could see before them a gathering of people in the scraggly grassy area just behind the church. It looked like a large picnic, or a little country fair. Children, elderly, families. About sixty people all told.

"Ain't that a sight? Pretty as a picture. And they're all waiting for you, Gia. Now, I'm giving you a choice. You wanna turn around and drive off? Well I won't stop you an' that's a promise. However, me personally being what I am and all, I_ really_ don't think you oughta disappoint 'em."

_The oven is still there,_ Gia thought to herself.

"It's all you, baby," Christine said.

—_Bitch!_

But Gia turned the key. Experimentally, she revved the engine. Almost of their own, her fingers curled like talons around the white rubber of the steering wheel. She felt herself smiling her twisted smile.

"...all you."

* * *

A half hour later, as the last few dents in Christine's radiator and bumper repaired themselves with comical little pops, Gia swerved toward the sign marked, "Zachry: pop 67." She felt a final moment of dark joy as it exploded into splinters.

"Just had to fix it so it's accurate?" Christine offered.

Gia didn't answer. She was merely... listening to the thrum of the motor. It was so comfortable, not thinking.

"Hey child, tell me true?"

"Hmm?"

"I asked you before about good and evil, remember? What's your answer now?"

.


	4. Chapter 4

(As translated from volume two of Keiichi Sigsawa's _Kino's Journey_, with gratitude to the _Baka-Tsuki _Project.)

* * *

_**Overprotection**_

— _**Do you need it?**_

* * *

It was their second day in the country.

While on her way to pick up Hermes at the car park after lunch, Kino encountered a bickering couple in front of her bike. They appeared to be a married couple in their thirties, and beside them stood a boy, about ten years old and looking more than a little lost.

The father said, "that's why I'm telling you - you're being overprotective."

The mother retaliated with, "no! You are being stubborn. This is for his own good."

The three were blocking her way to Hermes. Kino began by clearing her throat. "Ahem!" But before she could manage to say, "excuse me, may I pass through and get to my bike behind you?" the father noticed her and asked, "what do you think?"

"Huh? About what? I didn't hear the conversation." Kino cocked an eyebrow, amused by the sudden question. But before the father could explain himself, the mother interjected, "this stubborn man insists that our boy doesn't need a bullet-proof vest."

"Why would he need something like that?" asked Kino.

"The war, of course! Our son is joining the army," replied the father.

"War?"

"Yes, it broke out a few months back. It is the first one we've had since the country was founded. The army has been recruiting soldiers for the front lines. My son will be joining them today. Not to boast, but he will make a fine soldier, probably will return a hero too! But this foolish wife of mine keeps insisting that he wears a bullet-proof vest. What nonsense."

"Honey, the vest will protect our son from shrapnel."

"He just needs to crouch down to avoid that, not to mention there are trenches to take cover in."

"Even so, it will protect him from all sorts of things. He can't be a hero if he gets hurt; our son needs to be able to do his best to become a hero."

"But won't the vest be heavy? He can't move freely if he's bogged down. Also his squad will ridicule him if he's the only one wearing one."

"All he needs to do is say it's a gift from his loving mother."

After listening to the parents, Kino glanced at the boy and said in a carefully neutral tone, "why don't you ask the boy's opinion?"

"Oh... you're right! What do you think, Timmy? You will listen to mommy, won't you?" The mother bent down to gently place her hands on his shoulders.

The father also squatted down next to him, and held up an encouraging fist. "Come on son! You are a man, right? Real men don't need this junk."

"Don't worry, Mommy and Daddy will respect your decision."

"That's right, boy!"

The boy answered with a quaver in his voice, "I... I don't wanna go to war."

The father immediately stood up and said in a hard voice, "we're doing this for your own good!"

The mother also stood up and stared down at her son. "You need to join the army and become a hero. That way you will be able to enter a good college and university, and then you will get to work for a large company. Don't you understand? We are doing this for you. Didn't you say your friends in class are joining too? You don't want to lose touch with them, do you?"

"But... Johnny's parents won't let him go."

The mother began to raise her voice at her son. "What Johnny did is not our problem; you should decide for yourself."

"You shouldn't compare yourself with others."

The poor boy's face went pale with terror after this outburst from his parents. The mother took out a brand new bullet-proof vest from her bag. The small vest was still wrapped in plastic, with a piece of card attached which read, "to our brave young soldiers! Specially designed to reduce stress to the shoulders. Now with adjustable height to suit growing children. Ideal for long term use."

She half-squatted to place one hand behind her son, gently urging him. "Put this one on and let's go to the recruitment center. Don't be scared. Mommy will be with you."

"See? Like I said, you're being over protective."

"I just want the best for our son!"

"I know. Just stop overdoing it."

And so the bickering began anew. In the midst of it, the boy timidly said again, "I don't wanna go."

"Not again! You must have inherited that cowardice from your mother's side."

"What? Ooooh! He's as stubborn as you are, you old mule!"

Again the boy protested, now almost crying, "I... really... don't want to go!"

Kino interjected, her voice still carefully controlled, "maybe you should rethink this, with the boy."

The parents gave Kino a horrified and insulted look.

"Why don't you mind your own business? This is a family matter."

"Yeah, this is our problem! We really are doing this for our child."

"Right," Kino nodded. "I'll do that."

"Come on." The mother grabbed the boy's hand and began to drag him away. "We should head to the recruitment center before it's too late. We'll decide about the vest once we get there."

"Let's go, Timmy."

Kino watched as the parents dragged their son away.

She shook her head, and then turned back towards Hermes. The motorcycle greeted Kino with his wispy voice as she kicked up the stand.

"Must have been tough."

Kino answered honestly before hopping onto Hermes. "Yeah. It was."

* * *

_**Overprotection II**_

— _**Canticle**_

* * *

Gia skipped back toward the garage, carrying her old gear in a burlap sack and whistling a cheerful "doo-wop" tune Christine had taught her on the road. The sun was just starting to set, early morning for her these days. They'd stopped at a town to drop off their cargo. Turned out the place was in a state of war. Who was at war with whom, and why, she was foggy about and she didn't particularly care.

The black market in the area had been very pleased with the delivery – weapons she presumed, but Gia had deliberately resolved never to ask what they were carrying. The man had volunteered good prices on some interesting new toys. She'd purchased a much better bullet-proof vest, complete with trauma plates and relatively concealable. She'd found a clever little capsule that could be hidden inside the mouth, anchored between the teeth. When bitten, it became a kind of blowgun spraying incapacitant. Sneaky and dangerous, and illegal in most places, something she'd need to manage.

As she walked back to the garage, she found a trio, obviously a family, standing in the lot bickering. They didn't matter except they blocked her car's path to the exit. They had no idea as Christine was a level down – even when the car was quiescent people instinctively avoided crossing in front of her radiator. Still, it was annoying that people could be so oblivious.

"Why can't you be brave like your older brother?" Gia heard the mother say.

"But the bullet-proof vest didn't do Timmy any good!" The father announced, exasperated. Gia's ears perked, and she stopped to listen.

"Oh, just because of that you refuse to take any precautions at all!"

"Excuse me, young lady!" The father said. "Are you eavesdropping?"

"Oh!" Gia smiled her gruesome smile. "You happen to be in the path my car has to take to get out of this garage. Would you mind?"

"Of course!" The man nodded and escorted his wife and son to the side.

"Forgive me for asking," Gia ventured. "Did you say you were buying a bullet-proof vest for your son?"

"That's right," the mother confirmed.

"No," the father said at exactly the same moment.

The little boy remained silent.

Gia rummaged about in her bag. "I could sell my old one cheap 'cause I just replaced it with a much better one. He looks about my size if we let out the clasps at the waist."

"That's very kind of you, miss," the mother said. "But only the best for my little boy."

"Now wait just a second!" The father countered. "How much?"

Gia mentally computed the exchange rates and figured a little depreciation on her used vest. Then she automatically doubled the result and quoted it.

"We'll take it," the father said. Then to his wife, "are you satisfied now?"

"No!" the mother shouted helplessly. But Gia didn't want to let the deal slip away; she accepted the money and handed over her old armor.

"Dear... apple of my eye and love of my life," the husband said to his wife in a tone that said she was anything but, "Timmy was shot in the head. Even the best bullet-proof vest—"

"—would have made him keep his head down!" the woman said without much in the way of logic that Gia could follow. But she wasn't about to argue the point with a bereaved mother.

"The war?" Gia asked.

The father nodded.

Gia looked to the boy... for a boy he was, just on the cusp of adolescence. "Do you want to go?" she asked kindly, but directly.

The boy's eyes widened for a moment...

"Otto hasn't spoken a word since his brother-" then the woman broke off...

...because the boy shook his head emphatically "no."

"Son!" The father said, shocked. "You must be brave, like Timmy!"

Unnoticed, Gia started trembling like the lid of a pot set over a fire too long.

"And wear your bullet-proof vest!" The mother said urgently.

"Oh, I do not fucking need this!" Gia exploded. "You've both been brainwashed by the state to gut your own children on the altar of so-called patriotism. How about _not_ sending him to the sausage-grinder? Huh?"

"How dare you!" the mother husked!

"Young lady," the husband sputtered, "I should report you to the police for such talk."

Gia started walking down the ramp. "Yeah yeah, sedition. Blasphemy. Heard it all before. That's why I keep moving. You shitters're both hopeless and to hell with you." She gave them an obscene gesture as she descended the ramp.

"Oh," the wife said from the depths of her hissy-fit. "If only I was a man I'd—"

"You'd what? Send your son to fight me? Hey kid!" Gia stopped and waved to the boy. "Get yourself captured soon as you can, 'kay?" With a wink and a mimed gunshot, she vanished around the corner. She half-hoped the father would follow her so she could laugh at his mad scramble from Christine's onrushing grille, but no such luck.

* * *

"'Washes the ground with silvery tears.' Y'know," Christine interrupted their usual karaoke "doing things like that's gonna get you killed some day."

"Yeah, but at least I'll die without regrets," Gia answered breezily while they cruised at just over the posted speed limit. "And you wanna know something? It feels great. Swear I've discovered the secret to happiness. If I hadn't told those shitters off I'd have been grouchy all night. Maybe I should become a guru and write one of those self-help books?"

"How to Make Enemies and Piss People Off?"

Then a sad look crossed Gia's face, momentarily distorting her usual insipid smile. "But I didn't make any difference. The boy's still gonna get carted off to the front. All I did was blow steam. Talk's cheap." She felt the little hairs on her neck bristle, and knew before she looked that she'd see her own parents' faces in the rear view mirror.

"True," Christine was genuinely trying to reassure her driver. "But maybe what you said'll save the boy's life. At least you tried, and that means all the difference to you. To me too. Now more from your diaphragm this time, hun."

"You're a strange creature, Christine. Y'know that?" Gia patted the steering wheel.

"Huh! People think of my sisters and me – if they think of us at all – as monsters. Once upon a time, the Furies were the dealers of justice and retribution. Now we're forgotten." The voice had turned wistful, even sad. "'...And to fight for a cause they have long ago forgotten.'"

"'Then she'll be a true love of mine,'" Gia sang in counterpoint. They had reached the city limits, and the safe embrace of a moonless night awaited them. Gia pressed harder on the accelerator. "And yet, you call yourself evil," she mused aloud.

"I am what I am, and can't be anything else. It's the world that changed."

* * *

"_**...at least I'll die without regrets."**_

* * *

.


	5. Chapter 5

It was during the second of a pair of sodden and tempestuous weeks along the coastline that a peculiar crimson vehicle cruised through the bourgeois and aged municipality of Newburyport. The denizens of the community quietly noted this rufescent apparition rolling along State Street, and certain aficionados of the automotive arts quietly nodded their approval at its superb preservation. Despite its condition and age, the vehicle in question had little to offer any but these most facile and superficial of antiquarians, however massive its bulk or ostentatious its trailing fins. The carriage was the product and indeed the very typification of a crass and superficial era, the plaything of spoilt young rakes or of the gauche _nouveau riche._

The young lady who operated this somewhat archaic behemoth would impress still less. She wore the Stygian apparel favored by callow youths risibly flirting with a sort of shallow Gothic revival, although both her pallor and the sallow circles gracing her eyes were not mere affectations.

This dubious and unmistakably unsavory pair found their employment in the transportation and smuggling of contraband parcels, and had just completed their most recent errand when the vehicle's electronics emitted a suave and polished if synthetic voice.

"At the next intersection, turn left," it instructed with the casually domineering tone of a pedagogue. The young driver obeyed, passing handsome gabled Victorian homes and turning onto High Street as if she was the mechanical servant and the vehicle the living, vital entity. Indeed, such was much the case, for the youth had survived a precise and sophisticated surgical alteration designed to transform her into a fleshy automaton, while the automobile served as the earthly avatar of a fully sapient and cognizant eidolon. This unearthly spirit possessed neither power enough to call itself a god nor sufficient antiquity to warrant the title of elder, being itself merely marginally older than stripling _homo sapiens_ and therefore innocent of those ageless secrets of the pockmarked vertiginous void through which the Earth plummeted madly without end or aim.

The driver had been given a name redolent of these very lands, one once-popular some generations ago, though her sonorous and regal appellation had been shortened of necessity to the crude "Gia." The vehicle in turn might properly be referred to as "Tisiphone," a name guaranteed to raise the eyebrows, and perhaps the hackles, of many a student of bygone lore. In some paroxysm of irony this ghost-in-a-machine had perversely accepted the most unlikely of pseudonyms, a sobriquet properly interpreted as "follower of Christ." Perhaps "Christine" had ambitions of trailing the gentle Galilean preparatory to running him down.

The car cruised southward along the coast, with wetlands to the right and the beach to their immediate left, passing the long sandy line of an island. At length, it crossed a nondescript though relatively modern concrete and metal bridge over a river.

Gia's eyes followed the length of the gloom-shrouded cape, drawn to a very ancient manse set upon the island at her left shoulder, looming high above the surrounding sea foam. She shuddered, for she recognized some aura or taint upon it reminiscent of a domicile from which she'd fled in a panic weeks before. She quietly vowed to herself not to go anywhere near this strange high house in the mist.

Then her eyes turned forward again, for they had entered the river valley, and a disquieting, dismal and dank fishing village sprawled before them. Soon, as the electronic voice chimed its instructions, the vehicle wove its way through the cramped lanes toward the heart of the city; from Martin Road to Main, then Fish Way to Water Street and finally to Federal, where the sound of authentic cobblestones rumbled up the vehicle's frame. Soon the voice ordered the girl to park, and the cartographic projection faded from the windshield.

Gia peered out at this misty seaside town with little enthusiasm, for it did not appear at all promising. "I don't want to go," she said quietly. Her voice, characteristically a chipper and even tone, had acquired a subtly melancholy note. The smile almost permanently gouged into her face seemed wilted and sickly.

"Why not?" the silky voice asked with feigned innocence.

"Sh'yeah, right! Every time you want me to get out of the car, except those times we're picking up or dropping off contraband, I end up in some horrible mess. Christine, I really can't take it anymore. If you're trying to kill me, just get it over with."

As further evidence of the car's perverse sense of humor, the crooner Elvis Presley abruptly chimed in for a round of "Hound Dog."

"'Can't take it?' You sound pretty calm to me, hun."

"That's the operation and you know it. The only nice thing about it is everything is just fine, mostly. I don't feel very sad or lonely or... or guilty about some of the bad things we've done together—"

"Then how do you know they're bad?"

"I just know. Murdering your own parents is wrong."

"Oh hoo hoooo!" The car genuinely laughed. "Are you blaming yourself for that? If you had murdered your parents, you honestly think you'd still be alive? Around me? Girl, you couldn't have saved 'em... even if you'd wanted to."

"I think..." Gia said calmly. "...you're trying to comfort me. Thanks for trying."

"Now those seventy people in Zachry? That was you."

"Please stop." Gia glanced up to the rear-view mirror to see, as expected, her parents smiling at her.

"No. Go away," Gia said with answering-machine flatness... almost. She buried her head in her hands.

And when she looked up again, they were gone.

"Has it ever occurred to you," Christine purred from the AV, "that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids?"

Gia sighed.

"Real spirituality grows from being true to yourself, holding yourself responsible," the car argued. "If you abdicate that, if you lose faith in yourself—"

"Christine, if we just drove around making your deliveries, then everything would be—"

"Just fine!" Christine interrupted with a growl. "Gia...? Get out."

Compelled by the rotten wiring in her head, Gia opened her door and climbed out of her luxurious leather seat. She left the warm dry air behind and exited into a veritable world of wet cold fog. Her booted feet splashed in the water at every step. She watched, unsurprised, as the door shut of its own accord and the scarlet motor car puttered off on its own, trailing the discouraging verse, "...you ain't no friend of mine" in its soggy wake.

_Did I just get ditched?_

Gia sighed again. Her life was completely out of her hands now. Her parents were dead and she was merely the brain-damaged pawn of an infinitely sadistic killer car. Running away would serve no purpose; the Fury had her scent, and her kind were renowned experts at hunting people down.

Sometimes the appalling absurdity of her situation drove her to sobbing, but all that her scoured brain could bring forth for the world was a kind of titter.

Christine insisted upon dropping her off in one horrid pest-hole after another. The first had scared her out of her wits and the second had almost killed her. What awaited her here?

At the last city she'd insisted to Christine, who for all her other faults did scrupulously abide by certain rules, that either she must admit to being a slaver or pay her driver a fair share of their receipts from smuggling.

Gia had used these funds to purchase diverse weapons; they were cheap, but they were a start: a bayonet, a small pistol with holster, pepper spray and an inexpensive bullet-proof vest concealed beneath a black blouse. Better would follow once she could afford it. She'd also replaced the jeans with a black skirt, all the better to quickly and easily retrieve the small cylindrical switchblade she'd grown accustomed to concealing.

_I remember Kino telling me about all the things she learned to prepare for traveling alone. I don't have years and I'm getting dumped in places she'd have the good sense to avoid._

Gia even procured and wore a series of amulets and holy symbols. A handful of silver bullets were, to Christine's amusement, as high on her list of future acquisitions as a Taser.

_It feels like Christine's using me, like the weird rules she lives under prevent her from taking action until somebody wrongs me. Then she can do what she loves best. Is that what I am to her? A bit of cheese?_

Gia surveyed her current dismal, foggy surroundings, the relatively recent but already corroded and rusting industrial buildings and the ugly, prefabricated architectural calamities that huddled around them like piglets squabbling about their sow. She took a strange comfort in the fact that the circuit marked "misery" had been bloodily yanked from her still-living brain.

_Well, nothing for it but to find out what's lurking in this dump and see if Christine ever plans to pick me up. Fishing town... well, can't be worse than Zachry._

She favored a sign with her limp, crooked smile. _"Innsmouth." Swell. Maybe I can get some decent seafood._

* * *

_**City by the Clear Waters**_

* * *

The naif had been deposited upon Federal Street, where she balefully regarded a placard bearing the legend, "welcome to historic Innsmouth." The buildings around her certainly appeared to be artifacts of an earlier era, though carefully preserved without sign of decrepitude nor even a speck of litter. Slightly reassured, she looked about to find a wholesale fish dealer's office, a supermarket, a bright and cheery diner, a legal firm and a bus depot, all modern-looking and all housed in these ancient, fusty buildings.

The noisome aroma of fish hovered in the air all about, bringing with it a faint but consistent queasiness. Still, Gia was forced to admit quietly to herself, "place doesn't look so bad."

_Careful,_ she reflected. _Do not be fooled. There's some reason Christine dropped you here._

Resolved to unearth whatever obscure secret this town concealed before it could ambush her unawares, she entered the diner and promptly ordered coffee.

The waiter was a young gentleman, not much older than herself. Though she caught a peculiar distant look in his eyes, as though he was very tired. Still, his natural, unforced cheer promised a pleasant conversation. Gia felt her spirits rising; perhaps she could entirely escape whatever ordeal had been planned for her.

A running series of inquiries, an order of breakfast and a slow day at the diner combined to allow the waiter to actually hold a long and relatively uninterrupted conversation, and she was able to quickly acquire a cogent understanding of the town's recent history.

A public health scare had forced governmental intervention in the town generations ago. At the time Innsmouth had fallen, economically and socially, into an advanced state of decay. Prior businesses such as the Marsh Refinery had failed to bring any dependable prosperity, and even the once-legendary fishing trade declined, as if the very gods had somehow been offended by the destruction of the breakwater just offshore which had, according to public reports, bred some sort of pestilence detrimental to the inhabitants.

The authorities resolved to simply bulldoze, wholesale, the shanties and all buildings beyond repair. However, many fine and historically interesting Georgian homes and much of the civic center, including the very structures they currently occupied, were declared worthy of careful preservation for later generations to appreciate.

Installation of first rate fishing, canning and shipping facilities completed the economic restoration of the town, and whatever plague had once overshadowed Innsmouth was subsequently forgotten.

While the factory was now showing its age, the arrival of a prosperous church had helped once again to revitalize the ailing municipality, the waiter proclaimed proudly. The ministers had purchased and restored the Waite-Eliot hotel for use as their headquarters.

In return for supplying this helpful information, the garcon proved similarly inquisitive. He asked about Gia's plans and business in the area, and she revealed, quite against her wishes, that she had none.

Gia's operation had left her incapable of outright lying, though she'd discovered she could still conceal information with an effort. She heard herself telling the young man, without being able to prevent, that she was simply wandering aimlessly in the town after being dropped off by her friend.

A question led to Gia blurting out the name, "Christine." It was the strangest sensation, she thought, being unable to stop oneself from answering direct questions or disobey direct orders.

"I'm driving her around, but she just up and left me here without saying when or even if she'd come back for me." Gia was at least able to avoid mentioning that her traveling companion did not own but – was – in fact a car, for which she felt very grateful.

"So you don't even know where you're going to spend the night?"

Gia shook her head.

"In this weather? I'll bet if I ask nicely, some of my friends can find a place for you."

Gia expressed her gratitude and agreed to check back with him were she unable to find lodging. Her breakfast finished, she departed the diner.

The morning rain had stopped, and bright sunshine glinted from the drippy gables like so many diamonds. Gia felt the light warm both her heart and the air about her. It was unnatural to feel dreary or depressed when the day had grown so clear and attractive. She began to whistle a song from an older era and entered the supermarket.

Gia emerged with a local map. Despite the cheering change in weather, there was of a certainty some eldritch unpleasantness hiding in Innsmouth, and she was determined to ferret it out, simply in her own defense.

She set about wandering the industrial coastline, and found it a simple enough operation: docks, fishing boats, cannery and trucks. Despite the overpowering, appalling piscean miasma, nothing at all sinister lurked here.

She then meandered about the residential area and idly admired the antique homes. Architecture was most certainly not one of her interests, but in many sections of the town she found she could feel as if transported into some earlier age.

Had the windows of these very houses once seen tall vessels built of timber and bearing canvas white as clouds in the sunlight? On this very terrace facing the sea, might some widow have paced, waiting in vain for her husband to return from a voyage?

Gia was just beginning to enjoy her romantic, solitary tour when she noticed two men walking along the other side of the street. They were clean cut and otherwise nondescript, but they wore identical clothing – a pale blue button-down shirt tucked into navy-blue trousers. Gia had no particular reason to take note of them, except that the young waiter she'd spoken to before had worn exactly the same garments. Moreover, though these men walked with a deliberate stride, their eyes bore the same... lack of focus.

Gia continued her walk, and soon found a small group of women walking purposefully forward. Each of them wore cyan blouses tucked neatly into a prim, pleated skirt. Each blouse bore identical nautical-looking scarves. Each had about their eyes what Gia began to think of as "the Innsmouth look."

Gia considered. Their garb brought to her recollection the sort of uniforms schoolchildren sometimes wore, yet these women had clearly outgrown their scholastic years. This was nonetheless indubitably a uniform of some sort.

She inconspicuously followed the quartet of women until they arrived at an open concourse with a large pillared hall of obvious antiquity. There Gia saw, to her distinct discomfort, several men marching about it in what appeared to be be-ribboned naval uniforms, midnight blue with white piping and peaked white caps. Had she stumbled into some manner of military installation?

Adding to her confusion were several colorful, inviting signs identifying the place as "The Esoteric Order of Veracidelity." Internally, Gia winced at the clumsiness of this portmanteau.

Gia pivoted neatly on her heel and walked briskly away. She considered it likely that whatever obscure secret Innsmouth concealed would be connected with this strange military order. Well, all the better! She could simply avoid this site until the characteristically impatient Christine grew bored with the game and returned to reclaim her. Perhaps Gia was already free of the Fury, though this was far more than she could realistically hope for.

Her peregrinations soon led her to a fire station, and here her eyes beheld an unusual scene. A young blonde, one of the few she'd seen not wearing the azure uniform but rather a jacket with jeans, was attempting to converse with a uniformed girl. But the latter would have nothing to do with the former and sharply rebuked her. So rejected, the blonde stopped following and appeared to be fighting back tears.

Was the uniform the mark of some caste? The blonde didn't employ the sycophantic simper of a member of a lower class; quite the contrary, she demanded the other's attention only to be rebuffed.

Gia waited by the firehouse until the woman in uniform had walked out of earshot, and the blonde's small temper tantrum had expended itself, before attempting her overture.

"Hey, s'cuze me for bothering-" she began. The blonde turned and Gia saw the young woman hastily wiping back tears and composing herself. At the very least, these red-rimmed eyes were free of the Innsmouth look.

"I'm sorry," Gia back-peddled. "I'm intruding."

"No, no..." the blonde encouraged, hiding whatever distress she suffered from. "It's alright. What?"

The response was exactly what Gia had hoped for, so she fought to make her deformed smile as symmetrical as she could. "Could you explain... I didn't realize you were so upset. What is going on with all those uniforms around here?"

The blonde's mouth curled into a little "o" of surprise. "You don't know?" Gia shook her head and the girl abruptly looked about, to see who was spying on her. "If they sent you, you go right back and tell them I'm leaving. I don't want to publish secrets or enneg anybody, I just want out."

"I'm sorry... what did you just say? 'Enneg?'"

A little smile blossomed on her lips, and the blonde said, "you're telling the truth, aren't you? Alright, you don't want to be seen talking with me. Follow me. Keep back a ways."

Given what Gia had seen thus far in her journeys, she was far from disposed to scoff at these precautions. She followed the girl at a reasonable distance until they reached the coastline. Some modern-style beachfront homes had been built almost at the sand line, and her informant waved from a niche in a fence. Gia followed and found they were relatively protected from view on three sides. The blonde sat wearily in a scraggly patch of clover and offered a cigarette.

"Thanks, no. I never could stand 'em."

"Hope you don't mind if I do. I've been without 'em too long. Against the rules. So, you've never even heard of the Order of Veracidelity?"

"Sounds like a really stupid name to me."

"Yeah. Okay, I'm Zöe, Zöe Allen."

"Gia."

"Cool. Hi Gia. The girl I was talking to used to be my best friend in the order. But now that I'm an R.P. she's jamming me."

Gia cocked her head. Zöe in turn shook hers and grumbled to herself. "Stupid jargon! Sorry, I'm just so used to it. I've left the order and been declared a repressive person."

"Like an apostate."

"Right. So they all have a policy of refusing to have anything to do with me now. It's called 'jamming.'"

"Hmm. In fairness that's not the worst penalty for apostasy I've ever heard," Gia commented. "Why'd you leave?"

"Oh, where to begin? I was being hit, yelled at all the time, overworked, underfed, it was a nightmare."

"Why'd you stay? And if you say, 'I have nowhere else to go,' I'm gonna hit you."

Zöe chuckled at Gia's disgusted tone. "It was really nice at first. They told me they could fix everything that was wrong with me and that I'd even have superpowers if I advanced through enough levels."

"Oh brother!" Gia rolled her eyes.

"Don't be so dismissive. The order is very, very wealthy and powerful. They bought out a whole hotel for their baseship here and they practically run the city. They started with the hotel, bought it under a false name. The prefabs who live here weren't happy about it when they found out. But months before, the Order had infiltrated M.O.B.s into jobs at the newspapers, the police station and city hall. The Sec-sec knew all about who would roll over and who had to be managed."

"So they started enneging folks on their enemies list one by one. They framed the newspaper editor up as a pedophile. Then the chief of police got transferred to Ipswitch. The mayor dug in but they arranged a hit-and-run accident. Within a year, Top-sec M.O.B.s were in all the authority jobs. Like I said, they run the whole A.O."

"Okay," Gia tapped her fingers irritably. "Their spies took over the town, right? Gyeesh!"

"I got recruited by one of their baseships on the west coast. They convinced me to come out here to the superpower lab in Innsmouth. But... I dunno... I just got so sick of being used that I quit. They've taken all my money and I don't even know how I'm gonna get home!"

Gia considered offering the woman a ride, but ...no, she wouldn't wish involvement with Christine upon anyone, least of all a sad, wounded person like Zöe.

"You wanna know what's scary?" Zöe said as she stood and dusted clover from her hands. "I've seen some top-sec paperwork and they have plans to do this to even bigger cities. It's not what they've done; it's what they're gonna do."

"Where will you go?" Gia asked.

"Home," Zöe said. "For a little while. Get back in good with my family. Then we gotta just vanish so they can't enneg us. See, anyone who leaves is an enemy, and enemies are fair game. Best thing I can do is disappear."

Gia nodded and expressed her gratitude. Then she watched as the blonde left, and gave Zöe some distance before she too departed from the little seaside niche.

Now that the town's secret had been laid bare, Gia felt positively paranoid. If the order did run the police here, Innsmouth wasn't much safer than Zachry. She decided to go to the bus stop on Federal and quietly leave Innsmouth behind. Let Christine track her down if she wanted. Or not.

Gia entered the bus stop to find it, unlike the rest of the city, dilapidated and derelict. With no one to purchase tickets from, she sat down in some consternation, and tried to plan her next move. Could she simply walk out of the city? The marshy wetlands to the west looked dreadful, and it had just rained.

"This is your lucky day!" the waiter abruptly proclaimed, startling Gia dreadfully.

"Huh?" she replied with her unfailing gift for wit.

"Well, the bus won't even be ready until tomorrow. Had a breakdown or something. But I've already arranged for you to stay with us."

"Us?" Gia said, grimacing in sudden fear. Or at least that's what she tried to do; she had no idea if her face could do that.

"Come with me," he said with a spacey grin. And it was exactly the perfect thing to do, because Gia's legs walked her quite involuntarily toward him. He turned and led the way, his breezy confidence apparently bolstered by the large men in black leather trench coats and sunglasses lounging just across the street. "We've got a nice clean bed in a warm room just waiting for you."

_Oh great! He thinks I'm a transient._

"Now don't get enturbulated. It's not far. C'mon."

Gia moaned inwardly, for the operation left her no option but to follow as ordered. But all that came out for her companion to hear was a happy little warble. She listened distantly to his sunny tales before they arrived—

Gia found herself confronting what she assumed must be the largest building in the town, a gabled brick giant self-consciously constructed to harmonize with the Georgian style so long favored by the local populace. This was, she quickly surmised, the former Waite-Eliot hotel, now renamed Baseship East.

She glanced up at the wrought iron gateway and read there the legend, "The Truth is What is True for You."

_And that is the most deliberately shaky foundation for a philosophy I've ever read._

"I can see from your smile you're impressed," he said, holding the door open for her. The reception hall that awaited them was, like everything else in town under their management, sparkling clean and efficient-looking. The hotel had been restored perfectly, and made lavish with white marble, expensive tile and blue draperies reaching all the way to the ceiling.

"Very nice," Gia admitted.

"I'm going to leave you to your accountant now. I'm truly happy for you. This is the start of an amazing adventure!" The waiter turned her over to a tall, humorless looking woman wearing the female version of the navy dress blues she'd seen earlier.

"Do not speak," the woman commanded. "Come." And Gia did.

She was brought to a quiet parlor, like a library's reading room, filled with little booths. The room was silent except for the sounds of muted voices.

"Sit that body down," the woman ordered. Gia did so, and the woman took a seat directly across from her. She wheeled toward Gia an odd little machine housed in a cute pink curvilinear plastic casing. This she plugged into two chrome spheres mounted in the armrests of Gia's chair.

"Place your hands on the spheres," the woman commanded. "This is an M-Path. It tells me if you're in distress, even if you're lying. It is through these accounting sessions that we can help you."

"Help me?"

Of course! We're going to extirpate your traumories."

"Why?"

"I'm sorry, that is a non-word here. Your name?"

Gia tried to stay silent. "Juh... Ju—" she shook with the effort.

"What is your name?" the woman repeated, more loudly.

"Gia."

"Last name?"

"I don't have one anymore."

"No need to be shy. Try to relax. Take deep breaths, dear. You're among friends." The woman's voice was robotic, cold as a machine, and in sharp and ironic contrast to the sultry, passionate voice of the real machine Gia knew.

"I don't understand—"

"Gia," the woman interrupted. "You were doing so well. But you are now attempting to exert your rational mind. This is a place, and a procedure, beyond your prefab thinking. Reason is unwelcome here." Her fingers followed the forms before her.

"Occupation?"

"Live bait," Gia groaned. _And oh, this is gonna get so ugly!_

The woman didn't even blink. "What drugs do you take?"

"I sometimes take aspirin."

"Verify - what drugs do you take?"

"I take aspirin. For headaches."

"But your- ...tell me why—" the woman caught herself. "...what makes you smile like that?"

"An operation."

_Oh God... no! Do not ask about the operation!_

"Gia, I've marked you down for a blood test with neutranarc-sec. We do not use illegal drugs here."

"Goody, 'cause I'm not taking any." For once, the sugar in Gia's voice actually communicated her snarking better than she'd ever hoped.

"Your needle is floating," the woman commented with a grunt. "Good. I appreciate your being honest. Tell me your sins."

Gia could hardly believe her ears. "What?"

"That was a force two vocal command. I do not want to exert force five. Tell me your sins."

_No! No, goddamn it!_

"I killed my parents."

_Fuck!_

The well-practiced composure on the accountant's face, the dead Innsmouth look in her eyes, flickered away for a moment. She was shaken.

_There's still a human being in there, _Gia noted.

"How did you kill your parents?"

"With a car."

Both their eyes looked to the floating needle on the M-Path, which did not waver in the slightest. The woman turned a little pale.

"Tell me what brought you here."

"The waiter from the restaurant brought me here." Gia tried to force the hostility and outrage she was feeling into her voice, but all that came out was the usual saccharine-laced lilt.

"How did you come to Innsmouth?"

"I was dropped off."

"By whom?"

_Crap!_

"By Christine."

"Who is Christine?"

_Oh... what the hell? Let's cut to the chase._

"Christine is the Fury Tisiphone. She's inhabiting an old Plymouth Fury and she uses me as a lure. She doesn't care about me; she's just looking for an excuse, any excuse. If you hurt me or do anything to me, she will hunt you down and grind your bones into the mud. If you imprison me, Veracidelity blood will pour through the cobblestoned streets of Innsmouth."

As one, their eyes turned to read the M-Path again.

"My needle is floating," Gia said with honey sweetness.

The woman fought to keep her practiced, businesslike mien but could not hide a sudden, deathly pallor. Abruptly she jumped to her feet and rushed out into a side office. Gia overheard the man waiting inside bellow, "you're never to leave in the middle of a session!" and then heard the woman shout him down. She couldn't hear their conversation after that, but she enjoyed imagining.

Finally, the woman returned, followed by a clean-cut, older officer type. She said, "Gia, the guard at the door will take you to your room. You are to remain inside until you are called for."

Without a word, Gia got up and went to the door.

* * *

_**Reason is unwelcome here.**_

* * *

Gia heard the lock click behind her, and silently cursed herself for not investing in locksmith's tools. _Something to add to the list._

She found herself in a dorm room. It was not shabby but it had no personality at all. A small wall-mounted desk with chair and clock, a bunk bed and a window with navy blue curtains. More a cell than a room. Sometime while she was downstairs, it had begun to rain again.

After trying the door, Gia checked the window; it opened with ease. Cold wet air blew into the room. The roof of a nearby building was visible, tantalizingly near, but there was neither balcony nor even ledge to take her near enough. She might risk the leap if only she could reach... the second window down, she estimated.

_How to get there?_

Gia watched the last of the daylight fade from view. She had a plan. She was going to escape. Then she'd find Christine and let her do whatever she wished to in this horrible place.

At least that's what Gia told herself as she leaned on the windowsill. She felt nowhere near so confident. Nevertheless, she could feel real hatred welling up inside her. It didn't take a genius to realize these versimilitarians, whatever they called themselves, were rotten to the very core, using their techno-version of a Ouija board to exploit the credulous and the needy.

* * *

_**Real spirituality grows from being true to yourself, holding yourself responsible.**_

* * *

Night time in Innsmouth.

Gia wondered what sort of incompetent ninnies would fail to search her for weapons. They just had no idea who they were dealing with. She took a pillow, wrapped it around her pistol, and opened the door to the bathroom.

The adjoining door was locked. One gunshot later, it had no lock.

The next room was occupied. Gia removed the pillow from her gun, and the man ran out of the room in only his underwear. _It's the lighter moments that keep me going, _Gia chuckled to herself. She followed the man out the door and into the hotel corridor. In passing she admired the tasteful white-bordered navy carpet, so much better than the tacky trim of most hotels.

_Focus, Gia! _

The next room was locked. Pillow, trigger, open. Unoccupied. Gia strode to the window and opened it. The yawning distance that now confronted her was frightening, but what was that to somebody who'd spent even one night in Hill House? Gia kicked out the screen, let it fall, holstered her pistol, climbed onto the sill and leaped.

She just made it, just managed to find traction before skittering off the edge of the adjoining rooftop to her almost-certain death. _Now what?_ She'd not planned any farther. She heard shouting in the hotel behind her.

She stood atop one of the high-peaked Georgian homes. Gia carefully walked to a window, shot out its latch and kicked the glass inside. She heard voices nearby as she found and strode purposefully down the dark stairs, sought out a back door and exited.

Her escape had taken less than two minutes. Gia breathed a sigh of relief to find herself back on the street and free. But there were plenty of streetlights, and she could hear behind her she had kicked over a veritable hornet's nest.

_Can't stay. Damn! Should have checked the closet for a uniform... I could have blended right in. Think ahead, you silly girl!_

She pulled her map of Innsmouth from her pocket, and tried to plan a hasty escape. The main streets would all soon be filled with patrols.

The Manuxet cut through the city at a point just to the south... it would be a dangerous gamble, but she had always been a good swimmer.

She heard dogs barking. _Big dogs. _There was no other decision and no more time. Gia ran south, and soon heard the noise of rushing water.

The river swirled through a concrete trench in the heart of the city. Gia wondered as she climbed over the wet iron mesh fence if she was committing suicide. Not for the first time, she reflected that her death meant an escape from these horrid situations and an end to her hateful peonage to the Fury Tisiphone. She jumped in without hesitation.

The icy tendrils of the water shocked her, and made her instantly regret her decision. She broke the surface with a howl of anguish.

_Swim! Just swim!_

The cold lashed her on, and as she had the thunderous current with her, she reached the ocean in less than a minute. Now the current was sweeping her away, and might even take her to sea. Gia broke away to the north, and fought for the beach.

_"Enturbulated."_

The rain-swollen current proved too strong, but fortunately for Gia, she found purchase upon the ancient breakwater reef that protected Innsmouth harbor.

She sucked on the painful abrasions that the coral had inflicted upon her hands. She shivered in the wet moonless night and looked around.

Nothing but seawater, lapping in waist-high waves about her in the rain. She was standing upon a coral reef just beneath the surface. She had escaped her captivity only to lose herself outside of the tiny safe spaces reserved for humanity.

_Gia, the cold is gonna kill you if you don't get back to shore!_

She saw streetlights to the north, a spur of land leading to the reef? Gia started walking, as if walking on the water, toward those beckoning lights. Even in this downpour, the stink of fish almost overpowered her.

Abruptly Gia stiffened. She could feel, with as much certainty as she'd felt in Hill House, that something watched her.

She turned and saw furtive movement in the moonless dark brine behind her, and shuddered. Shark? Barracuda? What in heaven's name could be out here on a coral reef in the rain, after sundown?

Shaking with cold, she soon set foot on land and then on pavement. She had alighted at a terminal cul-de-sac serving modern seaside homes. A nice, normal-looking neighborhood, yet Gia shook with cold and fear, for shadowy figures darted away from the circles of light of the streetlamps into the concealing dark. She was far from alone.

It was at this moment of dreadful despair, surrounded by lurid ichthyic shadows and shivering pitifully from the cold and wet that Gia heard a familiar voice singing, "...changing my life with a wave of her hand. Nobody can deny that there's something there." Just up ahead, a car blinked its headlamps.

Gia sloshed toward the lights and the music, and presently found herself standing next to the familiar form of Christine.

"Girl, you are full of surprises! I wasn't expecting you to pop up yet. And did you actually come from the seaward side?"

Without a word, Gia tried to open the door, only to find it locked.

"Uh uh! You are not getting saltwater in my upholstery."

Gia glared at the car, briefly considering blowing out the locks with her pistol. Of course, it had been soaked and she wasn't sure it would fire.

"What about them?"

"Saw 'em, did you? Trust me, they don't care. You got some spare stuff in the trunk."

Too cold and weary to argue any further, Gia stripped. The trunk popped open and she tossed her sopping clothes inside with a wet slap.

"There's a good girl." Christine's door opened, and Gia gratefully crawled into the toasty-warm interior. She curled up on the smooth, giving leather and drank in the delicious heat. The doors locked behind her.

"See how well I take care of you? Now Gia, I gotta ask you to not sit up or even open your eyes until I've properly warned you, okay? Right now we are surrounded by the Ye-ha-nuhth-lei, the children of Dagon, favored of Kuh-thlul-thlu. When you're ready, go ahead and look."

The cabin light switched on. Gia sat up. Every way she looked, fish-like heads with bulging watery eyes peered through the glass right into the car, at her. Gia stuffed her fists into her mouth to stop her screaming.

"In your language they're called the Deep Ones. Aren't you glad I warned you?"

Gia abruptly recognized these monsters with their rheumy, iridescent eyes and pulsating gill slits. She'd seen one of these creatures before in an old black and white horror film, and it was only this familiarity that kept her from fainting dead away from fright.

"Don't worry. I've told 'em you're with me. They probably would've smelled me on you anyway and left you alone, but you'd better not count on that."

Presently, the hideously beautiful gill-men lost interest and resumed their orderly progress westward. Gia watched, gaping and awestruck. "There are so many...!" she finally managed. "Where did they come from?"

"'Come from?' You may remember the government blew up part of their reef for 'public health' years ago? Y'ha-nthlei is their home," Christine said evenly. "Innsmouth is theirs, and they are not pleased."

Gia began to laugh hysterically. "Oh, when I'm cheering their kind on against my fellow humans, everything has been turned upside-down!"

"Are you, really? Well now tell me, were you hurt? Did anyone do anything bad to you?"

"They locked me up in a dorm room, but otherwise, no."

"Well doggone it, girl! I came here to get a cut of the action. Now we don't have cause!"

"The rules?" Gia said wearily.

"You're slacking off," Christine chided. Her engine ignited and the GPS awakened. "Guess we might as well move on. You up to taking the wheel?"

Gia grunted and popped the parking break. "I'm still not happy with you."

"'Happy?' Happiness is overrated. We got pills in the trunk'll make you happy. Or you could go back to the Veraciwhatevers, if there are any left. You'd fit right in, and it'll only cost you your freedom, your integrity and your dignity."

"Guess some folks think it's worth it," Gia grumbled. She put the car in gear.

"That's so. You don't get to be my age without learning a few things. There are always a surprising lot of people who're happiest when somebody takes away the burden of being themselves, having to make their own choices. Maybe... they have some inkling how little the world cares for them. Anyway, doesn't matter what cock-and-bull story you feed 'em. You're stronger than you look if that's foreign to you."

The rhythmic beat of the windshield wipers and the balmy heat soothed Gia. "That's an unusually tolerant idea, coming from you."

"I only intervene when their masters command 'em to do wrong. I'm an agent of karma. Speaking of karma, your friends in the hotel are about to get a face-full of it. I'd stay and watch, but from the sound of that laugh you've lost your quota of sanity points for one night. Let's go find you a laundromat and some hot soup in Rowley."

As they drove up Water Street, Gia could see and sense the batrachian shamblers all around them, risen to retake their stolen city. She thought of the sleepy-eyed people in their hotel, not even dreaming what stumbled their way.

"You wanna know what's scary...?" Gia quoted.

* * *

_**It's not what they've done...**_

_**...it's what they're gonna do.**_

* * *

.


	6. Chapter 6

"How do I let you talk me into these things?" Gia growled.

"Don't blame me, honey! It wasn't my idea," Christine retorted.

"You were worried about me getting your precious upholstery wet, and now you let that lie around bleeding in your backseat? You're gonna stink of fish for months!"

* * *

_**One of Us**_

_**- Part One**_

* * *

Gia felt much better. They'd found a laundromat in Rowley, and her clothes still felt toasty-warm from the dryer. At the moment it happened she was sitting in a tidy all night coffee-shop, gratefully gulping her "morning" coffee and some hot ham-and-butter-bean soup. The memory of her latest ordeal was already fading.

But she slumped a little in her booth. She didn't like the way the other people in the diner were looking at her, or rather, the way they'd look at her and then resolutely refuse to look at her. Sure, her face was a little distorted, but... it made her feel lonesome. The only person in her life these days was locked inside an automobile, and homicidal.

Abruptly, Gia sat up straighter, and her head darted this way and that. Her searching eyes found the antique car waiting right outside the window. She jumped up, leaving her half-finished meal forgotten on the table, and made a beeline for the door.

"Hey!" The counter-clerk abruptly shouted. "Where you think you're going?"

Gia looked back, startled. "Oh!" She rummaged around in her pockets and found some money. "Right. This should cover it, and keep the change."

Placated by the tip, the hostility drained from the man's face. Weird kid, weird smile, and absent-minded. Probably impaired somehow. He tried to give her a nod and a smile, but Gia was already out in the drizzly night, heading toward her antique car.

Gia was a monster.

The clerk had no way of knowing that, knowing what he had witnessed in her insipid smile and preternaturally oily voice. Once upon a time the girl's name had been Georgiana. Her parents were strong and upright, and they could not tolerate the inexplicable, unspeakable flaw that their perfect daughter had fallen prey to.

They had, in desperation, paid dearly for an operation: a brain surgery that would, so they were told, cut the child out of her and replace it with dutiful obedience. It was this operation that gave the girl her sick, inhuman smile. Feeling herself diminished, Georgiana ever-after answered only to "Gia."

"That was quick," the voice from the antique car's GPS said. "Soup wasn't any good?"

Gia plunged into the seat and slammed the door. "Tiffy, you hafta go back."

"What's that?"

"To Innsmouth. Robbie's been hurt, bad. You gotta bring him home."

"Gia, you're really confusing me. What's got into you-"

"Eyeeww! She's not complete!" Gia abruptly winced and grabbed her nose. "Somebody took a rasp to her brains, I can feel it - oh yuck!" And just as abruptly, the look on Gia's face changed to startled wonder. She looked about, exactly as she had a minute earlier inside the diner.

"...How did I...?"

"Ahhhaa... I get it. Cecy!" Christine's engine fired, and all by itself the car backed out of the diner's parking lot and roared forward onto the road. "Bear with me, Gia. I'll explain as we go. We've got a job to do so let's get to it."

"We're going east?" Gia said, confusion piling upon confusion. She shoved her arms through her safety harness, clicked the latches, and then reached for the wheel. She somehow felt the car returning control to her. "Back to Innsmouth? What for?"

"A family member's hurt. We gotta take him home."

"You have a family?"

"You're that surprised?" Christine sounded more than a little miffed by the question.

"You uhm... seem very self-sufficient."

The car was not satisfied. "Everyone needs a family, even an adopted one."

"Don't get that way," Gia cut her off. "You took mine." Bitterness hid just behind the flat, automated cheer of her voice.

"You can thank me by going faster. Tonight we're doing ambulance duty."

"'I am pure evil, I am Christine,'" Gia mocked, "and I am on a mission of mercy."

"Droll."

The car was a monster.

It spoke, it bickered, it drove by itself perfectly well, and it did believe itself "pure evil." The truth was, as it always is, more complicated.

The car served as the earthly home of an ancient spirit of vengeance named "Tisiphone." She and her sisters, Alecto and Magiera, had once avenged murder and injustice through feud and vendetta centuries before a masculine upstart declared "vengeance is mine!" or his gentler offspring had chided, "judge not, lest ye be judged." The sisters mocked these proclamations.

Until one day, they found their offices usurped. Government and nation declared themselves sole and infallible arbiters of justice. The Furies, disenfranchised and disowned, defied all who would deny them. So they passed long and lonely millennia, prowling the night-shrouded world, granting their aid to the increasingly rare mortals who remembered and called upon them.

Tisiphone, taking for herself the name "Christine," had met Gia soon after the operation, and perceived in her an injustice screaming for revenge. For had not her parents shed kindred blood?

So it was that the strong, upright parents perished, and Gia came to be Christine's new driver.

"Now it's time to open it up," Christine said. "Consider this a pop quiz on all the racing stuff I've been teaching you."

"I'll do my best. But these roads have some blind curves." Gia accelerated to an even cruising pace.

"Fast as you're comfortable with and no more, hun."

"So, back to you explaining what's going on...?"

"Right. Okay, there's this witch, see? She takes over people, like she just did with you—"

"Tiffy, hurry! He's hurt bad." Gia blurted. Then a look of horror crossed the girl's face as she stared stupidly at the car's wheel, just before they careened through the guardrails and down into the tall grass of a gully. Gia and Christine screamed as one.

The car engaged her brakes and momentum shoved Gia painfully against the racing belts. Then the laws of physics mercifully dropped her, limp and gasping, back into her seat.

"Hell's bells! What do you think you're doing?" Christine protested, outraged.

"Ow! Wha- what... did I fall asleep at the wheel?" Gia's eyes bulged in befuddlement. "What happened?"

"Oh for pity's..." Christine grumbled. Then she blasted over her speakers: "Cecy! You get back here, right this instant!"

"Who's Cecy?" Gia demanded, hands to her ears.

"I'm gonna tell your mom!" Christine bellowed.

"I'm sorry," Gia suddenly pleaded. "I don't know how to drive. Are you okay? Ow, my arms!"

"Racing belts, Cecy. And you better thank all seven stars you were born under I insisted on gettin' a six-point harness installed and that Gia always, always wears it!"

"I said I was sorry," Gia protested. Of course, it wasn't Gia who said the words, merely her mouth that uttered them.

"I'm not the forgiving sort," Christine growled. "Cecy, you do not just... take over my driver like that, you understand? Too dangerous. We're going too fast."

"But you don't need her!" Cecy protested with Gia's voice.

"Yes I do! I've a lot of responsibilities; I can't be bothered to watch the road every second."

"Yes, Tisiphone." Cecy nodded Gia's head. "I'm sorry."

Christine backed herself onto the road once again. The damage to her front bumper and radiator was already vanishing with tinny groans and plinks.

"Go tell Robbie and the others I'm on my way."

"Already did," Cecy's voice was full of purpose again. "They're waiting at the town square. But you need to hurry."

"So you said. Don't waste my time talking to me."

"Get him home, Tiffy."

Then Gia's expression changed to exasperation. "Christine, this is weird even for you - why am I blacking out?"

* * *

Cecy was a monster.

Cecy found and slipped inside a convenient bat flapping away from the red behemoth that had careened into his quiet roadside gully. She creeched through him and heard-saw, as she'd learned to long ago, the car arrowing down the road. The sharp, befurred ears even overheard the driver's confused demands for an explanation.

"Gia," Tisiphone had called her. A woman. A girl, really. It was rare for Tiffy to cozy up with a girl driver. Why her? The waif wasn't anything impressive. And then there were those nauseating vacancies inside the girl's skull and behind her nose. In a long lifetime of seeing wrong things, those made even Cecy squirm.

Well, "Christine," as Tiffy had taken to calling herself these days, had always been a sucker for a long face and a sob-story. Her only real weakness.

Cecy joined a flock of bats riding the night wind, and leapfrogged one to another, then spiraled up to an owl, cut short its swoop upon a careless rat and instead soared east, then down, down to Innsmouth. And there she donned a deep one.

They felt strange, oily and squishy on the inside. Cecy had known in her long unnatural life what a hawk knows soaring over the sunlit treetops, or an earthworm feels wriggling through hard-packed dust in the dark, or a wasp darting and dancing over an angry, hungry tarantula, But the deep ones were not wholly of this world. Their lineage came from the stars, for only thus might they blend blood with ichor. They made Cecy uneasy wearing them, like an ill-tailored suit. She would make it quick.

"Help is coming. Tell Phy'thya-l'y." Cecy indulged herself in a moment of pride. Learning the basics of the language of Y'ha-nthlei hadn't been at all easy, but she could pronounce it well, at least while wearing one of their own. With that she left the mucous-filled eyes behind and jetted away within a squid that, after the deep one, felt familiar and comforting.

There was nothing more she could do. She had delivered word to the undersea queen that help was on its way. Interrupting Tisiphone's driver again would only get her yelled at, no matter how frantic everybody felt. Someday, she reflected, she ought to learn to drive-!

-A late-flying seagull snapped up the squid, and Cecy scrambled post-haste into the gull. She swallowed the yummy raw calamari whole, paused for a moment to observe the ironies of her unique perspective, and then decided to circle and keep an eye on things.

"Tisiphone's on her way," the gull squawked to no one in particular, But in her attic bedroom, the family heard Cecy speak. They sighed in relief, and whispered their approval to each other around her bed of Nile sand. With her gifts, Cecy could make anything turn out right. Almost.

* * *

Gia gulped as she saw an orange glow on the horizon, and knew Innsmouth was burning. The gill-men had been at their work, reclaiming their town. When she and Christine crested a hill on Rowley Street, she whistled, impressed.

Aside from a few smaller sites, it was the Waite-Eliot hotel that danced orange as it consumed itself. Gia didn't see anyone on the streets trying to put the fires out.

"You sure this is safe?"

Christine didn't answer. _She isn't, and she doesn't wanna scare me. Oh wait... no, she dumped me off here in the first place._

Gia retraced the narrow, old-fashioned streets as quickly as she dared, until she brought them to a parked idle in the now-familiar town square, near enough to feel the heat from the nearby blaze.

"Well done, Gia." Christine said. Her horn honked thrice, then her engine dropped to a low, resting purr, a tigress in repose.

Soon enough, a school of the repugnant gill-men appeared, carrying one of their own on a plastic tarp. Gia opened the passenger door for them and shoved the front seat out of the way. They placed their limp burden into the back efficiently, shut the door, then plunged back into the night with surprising piscine grace. Any doubt Gia had of their cognizance vanished – those were thinking creatures capable of communication and busy teamwork. Her hackles rose at the thought of having them angry with her, and wondered what sort of accord Christine had with them.

The stink of fish assaulted her immediately. "Pyew! I'm not sleeping back there until we get you cleaned." She shoved the car in gear. The voice from the GPS started issuing commands. As usual, Gia had no idea what their destination was, but soon determined they were headed northeast.

"How do I let you talk me into these things?"

They had a bad moment soon after - they ran smack into a military convoy headed to the town to restore order. Gia dearly hoped they'd not look over their cargo in the backseat. She doubted even Christine could overpower a... whatever massive thing they were driving. Fortunately the soldiers were in a hurry.

Gia had, after recent events, procured a new drivers' license. It wasn't real but it was authentic enough to pass a military policeman's cursory inspection. He waved her on and they were on their way again. Gia sighed in relief. How strange to be a fugitive, a criminal. Company I'm keeping, I guess.

Not a mile later, the reserve tank light flickered on. "Delays, delays," Gia sighed. "We're gonna lose about ten minutes refueling."

"Yeah, I figured. Can't be helped, hun."

"Since you're stopping," a strange, croaking voice came from behind, sending an unpleasant chill right up Gia's spine, "I don't suppose I could trouble you to purchase a cup of hot tea?"

Gia blinked. The voice was raspy, wet and hoarse, the words almost unintelligible. But there was no mistake, the thing in back had spoken.

"Is that a good idea, Robbie?" Christine asked. "With you so badly hurt-?"

"If I'm fated to die," the thing in the backseat gurgled, "I mean to at least... make time for a proper cup first. P.G. Tips if possible."

Gia coudn't help it: she started giggling.

"What's so funny?" Christine bristled.

"I'm sorry." Gia hastened to explain, for Christine was not wisely provoked on such matters. "There's a seven foot tall fish-man named "Robbie" curled up in my backseat, badly injured and politely asking for tea. I'm just going a little mad."

"Yes," the fish-man wheezed. "The situation is... grotesque, isn't it?"

A gasoline station abruptly turned up on the left side of the road. Gia dismissed her giggling fit long enough to skillfully whip their car across the lanes and astride a pump in a single curvilinear move. The voice from the GPS rewarded her with an approving coo.

Not three busy minutes later, both car and gill-man had their sustenance.

"Proper introductions are in order," Christine said cheerfully. "Robert, may I present my latest driver, Gia."

_Clever_, Gia thought. _Christine's talking like there's no emergency at all, keeping the thing calm._ "Nice to meet'ya."

"I wish... we'd met under better... circumstances, Miss Gia." The fish-man's weak words were interrupted by dull rasps. Gia pushed the throttle harder; she didn't like those sounds. "My name... glkh! ...Robert... at least when I... walked on the Earth."

Gia wasn't sure how she felt about being on a first name basis with an iridescent fish-being. "Glad you're awake," she said, "and your sense of humor's intact. How you feeling?"

"Like a motorboat ran over me."

"Ouch!" _Yeah, an outboard motor would be a painful way to go._

"Thank you, Miss Gia." Robert's voice was barely a breathy whisper. "Thank you, Tiffy."

Robert Olmstead was a monster.

He had not always been thus, though he was fated from conception. His mother was of the Elliott family, which had unknowingly accepted a Marsh for daughter-in-law. Robert's blood was commingled with the sticky ichor of the stars. The result lay sleeping, bleeding, its gills pulsing in a languid rhythm, the horror of his slow transformation - once all-consuming! – forgotten an age ago.

After a minute of hearing only the thrum of the engine, Gia said quietly, "Tiffy...?"

"Hmm...?"

"Your nickname?"

Tisiphone grunted. _She's embarrassed,_ Gia noted to herself with glee. _So even a Fury has friends she unwinds with. Wonder what they're like._

* * *

The house had a dire history. Its maker was a monster.

A wild and a wicked man, Emeric Belasco's ghost had rumbled and rambled inside his wretched, windowless mansion for years before at last being forcibly evicted and dispelled into whatever hell awaited him.

The emptied house had remained, untenanted and hated, and falling ever deeper into disrepair, to the satisfaction of the few souls who had known it and survived. Yet it never quite crumbled. Protected by a misty, forested valley that human communities only now encroached upon, and preserved like a bog body by the nearby peat tarn, the onetime Belasco house bided its time, isolated by distance and by its foul reputation.

The Elliott family, eccentric and baroque to the extreme, yearned for an abode. A lifetime ago, in one swift and terrible week of spite and betrayal, of rumors and pryings and investigations, the family had packed their things, fled their ancient home whose celler roots seemed almost to plumb Mandarin mausoleums, and had watched it burn by a fire they themselves had set. The orange light of the blaze shined and glinted from their wet faces. But it is better by far to watch a fire from the outside.

They departed forever their Greentown, familiar if no longer precisely loved, though as if watered by their tears its memory grew greener as the family wanted ever more urgently a home.

It is not a happy thing to be dispersed and marked as strangers in the world. More dreadful still to be without warming hearth and comforting bed to rest securely in. Most especially if one's idea of the perfect bed meant silent cold slots of stone, or sturdy perches, or perhaps simply a lid.

This family, searching for a dwelling, heard ill-rumor of an empty and desolate husk. Their Timothy, grown by now into handsome manhood, had been dispatched to examine this Belasco house. So it was that Timothy entered first. Then Cecy, pushing aside the dull real-estate broker, just after him.

The place, Cecy reported, was filthy, as filthy as its maker must have been. It would need repairs and considerable redecorating, for old Belasco only had taste in his mouth. The house was entirely deserted. Entirely. And it was vast, vast enough even for an extended clan fond of housing the most distant relatives for the sake of familial love (provided they maintained impeccable manners, of course!) and of hosting frequent and lavish reunions.

The bored broker awakened from her daydream to hear, to her disbelief, that she of all people had accomplished the impossible: she had sold "Hell House."

Even before the woman had completed in her office the shamanisms of ink and paper, in a mad whirl and a rush the family came, bearing hammers and nails in boxes, wrenches and pipes, wires and electric arcana. Then with great beating noises, strong hands and low voices, seen and unseen, they toiled until in scarcely a week the place functioned, like a corpse resurrected and healed. Then came soap and polish, perfumes, sandpaper and incense, graceful hands and high voices to exorcize the demons of decay and stench, replacing them with sawdust and turpentine, until the hospital patient emerged coiffed and glittering. Pornographic friezes lay outside in sundered heaps atop drifts of moldy carpeting, waiting to be hurled all at once into the neighboring bog.

And then, restoration and remodeling finished, the great double doors, scoured and oiled and with brass fixtures polished and shining – opened!

The family dove inside to safety in a vast delirious flood. Winds found comforting flue and pipe. Creaks found new hinges. The ancient and beloved cat found a new and vaster hearth. Voices cheered with each new and wondrous discovery. And the house, desolate and derelict, thrummed with life and activity and noise and many, many black vitalities once more. Baths were drawn and honest sweat washed away. For the first time in living memory the kitchen boasted odors sweet and savory of baking and of roasting. Then with a feast and a ritual, the family claimed this house as theirs, consigning the long dead and unmourned name of Belasco to well-deserved oblivion and their memories of Greentown to scrapbooks and the past.

Then they rested easy and settled in, and languidly unpacked and arranged, until by some stealthy miracle the house became truly theirs, new and strange no longer. Why, house and family had always lived together! Greentown was... only a dream that had ended sadly.

The family was a family of monsters.

It was to such a house, and to such a family, that the red Plymouth Fury arrowed, slithering along the cut in the dense forest, bearing its odoriferous burden.

* * *

The fog was like driving into a wall. The GPS had long ago given up hope. Gia slowed their progress to what seemed after their haste an unforgivable crawl. "Tiffy? I can barely see."

"You'll be fine, hun," the car said, seemingly through clenched teeth. "Cecy says there's no opposing traffic, no obstructions. You could go even a little faster, it's safe."

Gia smiled. _Who knows how "Cecy" told her that. And my, Christine does not like me using her nickname! Well, I'll just say it more often to needle her._

Together they slalomed through the forest and the fog along the old and neglected paving. Gia occasionally rubbed her palms across her skirt to dry them. And she shook a trickle of perspiration from her temple. But without doubt, months spent behind this wheel were paying off.

"Gia, you need to know... my family is very private. Discussing with outsiders anything that would violate their privacy would have..." here Gia felt her seat nudge forward a little, a gentle but dire warning, "...unfortunate consequences."

_Every once in a while, she just has to remind me who's boss._ "Got it," Gia assented. Then after an awkward pause, "I'm gonna need a looong nap after this."

"You're doing very well. Almost there."

Then Gia hit the brakes, for a towering house abruptly leaped out of the mist at them like some gigantic monster. The car skated on the moist road and half fish-tailed. Gia gulped and panted.

"Oops!" Christine said sheepishly. "Closer than I thought."

Gia popped the hasp of her harness and climbed out of the car, stiffly, for she'd been sitting all night and into the morning. She turned around and stared at the house.

Through hard experience Gia now had antennae out to detect what an older generation would have dubbed "bad vibes," though that usage had passed from the earth some time ago. At Nell's she'd sensed a singular harsh presence glaring down at her. The strange house near Innsmouth she'd avoided had felt like staring down a deep well that led down to some dark place where humans do not belong. But this... this! This house was not deserted, not solitary. It was large enough, though not of the inhuman scale of Hill House. It had been brightly and tastefully, deceptively painted to offset the dreariness of the frequent fog. And it was full - filled to the rafters! Crowded, crawling, bursting with vitality and presences. Oh, this house was occupied!

Gia felt faint. Then the sound of Christine's horn jolted her awake. Already the double doors opened and several people emerged.

Aside from their dark clothing, Gia dimly noted, they looked almost normal. Six men and a woman walked with tall aristocratic dignity to the car, like morticians or pall-bearers, pulled the limp and unconscious Robbie, _and I have come to think of him as "Robbie",_ plastic tarp and all, out of Christine and carried him gently toward the house. It was all a little anticlimactic.

_I hope he's still alive. It'd be a danged nuisance to go through all that just to deliver a dead body._

She leaned against the car. "Oooh... wow. Sorry. All at once all the running around I did, the swim and the hard driving without sleep..."

"Would it help to say I'm very pleased with you?"

Gia, her piled resentments notwithstanding, patted Christine's roof. _Is it the operation that lets me endure like that? Who can say._

The tall, stiff lady fussed and hovered as the men carried their burden. She paused at the threshold and then turned back. Gia felt a chill as the woman's eyes alighted upon her. She had seen enough and more than enough now to sense, to scent perhaps, that this woman with her upright posture and her elegant black dress and her lovely, royal appearance was scarcely of the same species as herself. And Gia knew a little perhaps of what a mouse knows when contemplated by a cobra.

"Tisiphone, ooohh! Well done and welcome home. Seeing you means something good came of it all. You remember the way to your garage, yes? I'll come join you. We have so much catching-up to do!"

Then she peered down and said, "And you... must be her attendant." The woman's voice lost its warmth but remained as stiffly elegant as her black gown, and as dark.

_That's a polite word for servant. Huh! Guess I can't call you wrong._

"Give your hostess a curtsy," Christine urged. "Manners are worth more than gold here." Gia obeyed as well as she could, though she was a trucker's daughter and had never curtseyed in her entire life. And it probably shows.

"I expect you've had an arduous journey. Please come in."

Gia's eyes widened. _Come into my parlor..._ She tensed, ready to bolt back into the relative safety of the demon car, the demon she knew.

"Gia," Christine chided. "Don't be rude. You're with me."

"And Tisiphone... is family," the matriarch concluded with an offhand gesture and as reassuring a tone as she could muster. "Tut! Child, you've helped preserve Robert's life. And it's... rare we entertain guests. You shall be safe... safer perhaps than you've ever been."

"You get some rest, hun." With that Christine closed her doors and puttered off at a leisurely pace around what Gia now perceived was a well-maintained driveway lined with deep crimson roses, until the fog swallowed her.

Gia gave the vacuous, deceptive smile the operation had left her with free rein. _And Christine dumps me off in yet another spooky hellhole. Someday I'm gonna find a mine and bury you in it, bitch. Just you wait and see._

* * *

The day crept on, and Gia spent much of it lying on a bed in what looked like a onetime nursery, her eyes staring at the ceiling, hardly daring to blink, and her ears straining for any warning sound. But none came. Her terror-clouded mind finally succumbed to exhaustion, and when her eyes snapped open again the last purple light of the day was fading from the curtains and the house was alive with the muffled thumps and groans and bustles of the waking family.

_It's night. And I'm alone. In the house. With them. And one of them is knocking on the door._

"Miss Gia?" A man's voice, coarsened by age and a country twang.

"Not ready to get up yet, thank you," Gia managed.

Her breath was foul and she desperately needed to relieve herself. After all she had seen and survived she'd thought herself beyond fear. But now she was surrounded, alone, in the belly of the beast. _Damn you to hell, Christine!_

A little later, not long enough, the voice returned. "Well, we'd hate for you to miss breakfast."

"Just a minute," she called back. _What am I going to do?_ She sat up and looked around the twilight room. Old-fashioned, as all such houses must be. A locked door, but they would have a key. A dresser, but not heavy enough to block passage. A window, but there was no convenient neighboring building to leap to this time. The voice again...

"Now don't be harsh, ma'am. She's just skittish as a spooked cat is all. She's not used to us."

"Gia?" The tall woman's voice. "Your breakfast is getting cold, and you are expected at the table."

Gia tried to think of an answer, any answer, but then the point was mooted.

"Now get up and open this door," kindly but commanding. Gia found herself standing and reaching for the knob before she knew what she was doing. A whimper escaped her lips and she froze in place. She trembled with a herculean effort.

"Gia, grown-ups do not hide in their rooms. Open the door."

_"Grown-ups?" Oh, you wretched, filthy car, you told her everything!_ And Gia gave up her useless effort to countermand the order and resigned herself to her fate. She watched passively as her hand turned the knob.

The tall woman stood there at the threshold, a matronly woman perhaps but still shockingly elegant. Behind her stood her very opposite, a slightly rotund, sunburnt old country gent in a plaid shirt.

"You see, Tom?" she chided the man. "You've only to be firm with her." With that, the woman pivoted on her stilettos as if she'd no further interest.

"Yes, ma'am." Tom held his straw stetson in his hands

Gia inwardly moaned. She knew this woman's type. Whatever weird and wild creatures she'd gathered to herself here, Gia knew that nothing happened in this, her domain, without her knowledge, and precious little without her permission. And Christine had told this obsessively controlling, domineering woman that direct orders turned her into little more than a puppet?

Tom drawled, "good mornin', miss Gia. Or I expect it's good evening for you. We keep odd hours here."

"Not so odd. I've been on the same schedule ever since—" she stopped herself. _Why am I telling a stranger this?_

Tom pointed to a door. "Here's a bathroom. When you're done I'll show you to the kitchen."

The bathroom was even more old-fashioned than the one she remembered from Nell's, and the furnishings were deliberately Gothic and odd. Gia would later note that the room boasted the only mirror in the whole place. Here was a perfect over-the-top mansion for this sinister family. She resisted the temptation to lock herself inside a second time.

Breakfast, at least, was normal and perfectly good, and so was Tom, it seemed. "Are you a servant here?"

"Oh no, miss! I'm part of the family. The mister and missus, they don't keep servants. Not that I blame you for thinking so. They're wealthy and old-world and I'm just a country boy. I was never one for dressing up or putting on airs, though I'm old fashioned too after my way. Taken up writing letters with quill pens and sealing wax since I came."

Gia smiled at the quaint image despite herself.

"Fancy clothes don't go with my job, y'see. I'm the caretaker. In a house this size, there's always something needs to be done." He sat up and said earnestly, "now I know you're taken aback. This is an eccentric family and that's a fact. But you're safe as safe ever was, so how 'bout you relax and see what there's to see?"

Gia spent the early part of the evening helping Tom with his chores, which mainly involved watering plants, cleaning drippings from candlesticks and installing new tapers. "We prefer these to electric lights. All incurable romantics here." Gia would have been charmed, had the tall tapers not been black.

As they tinkered about the house, Gia saw glimpses of the family going about their so-called day. Each vision was a revelation – bat wing, wolf fur, wine glass floating on its own, and many things yet unnamed. And each seemed deliberately to pay no attention to her. Let her come to them if she wanted, which she emphatically did not.

"So what are you doing here, Tom? You seem so..."

"'Normal?' S'alright, you can say it. It's not like we don't know we're odd here. I married into the family."

"You're kidding."

"Nope! Fell for Cecy years ago. Came courting soon after the family settled in here. That's love, y'know. Nothing worthwhile's ever easy, and you gotta take the good with the bad. And it's not all bad, not even close. You feeling better?"

"I am." And Gia meant it, for her condition did not allow her to lie to such a direct question.

"Good. 'Cause the family doesn't want to scare you, and some of 'em are eager to meet Tisiphone's new driver."

So Tom took her upstairs.

* * *

"She's afraid of us, Tiffy." The tall matron said sternly.

"Sister, I couldn't properly prepare her." Tisiphone protested. "Cecy just turned up and there was no time anymore."

The great red car sat quiescently in the house's spacious and well-equipped outlying garage, like an inert lump of metal and yet also like a great cat curled up happily in its lair, tail idly flicking and flapping. The radio softly played a soothing melody, and a man's gentle voice crooned with it, "God only knows, God makes his plan. The information's unavailable to the mortal man." Christine knew this place well, for here her former driver had made the extensive upgrades and refits that had elevated her to a genuine hot-rod. She felt happy here remembering him, and also enjoying the flattering company of family members who took time to consult, to seek advice or simply to glory in the company of the old, wise and mighty Fury in a rare state of friendly leisure. Even members of this exotic family, she knew, boasted about sharing tea with the Erinyes.

The family was proud to have adopted the three sisters of wrath, and gave them this clean, dry, well lit, well-appointed three-car garage with its white painted walls and waxed concrete floor for a home. The Furies accepted this generous gesture with unfeigned gratitude.

Lady Elliott, The tall woman sitting upright beside her, almost as old, also mighty in her way and, save only her oft-preoccupied husband, unquestioned ruler of the manor, sat quietly and stirred her tea. She enjoyed the music and refused to show it, but Christine knew her well enough to tell.

"I know that you think highly of young Gia," she said. "And let's be frank, you have always had a soft spot in your heart for the oppressed."

The song ended with a melancholy sigh, and for a moment the matriarch wasn't certain if that came from the long-ago balladeer, or no.

* * *

_**You gotta take the good with the bad. And it's not all bad.**_

_**That's love, y'know.**_

* * *

Tom pushed Gia gently into the room, and she caught her breath at the sight of many-times-great grand-mére.

And truth, many-times-great grand mére would have caught her breath at the sight of Gia, had she breath to catch. For Gia was so shockingly young, her face not yet flogged by time, but her limbs and bosom were generous and free of youthful spindliness.

And many-times-great grand mére remembered seeing such a sight before, in a mirror of polished silver, on the day she had returned from her journey.

The woman in the silver mirror was Nef, and she had come of age. Her father, whose word was law, had commanded that his young daughter take a husband. But she was not displeased, for had she not stood behind him and whispered into his ear, "see father? That one! Is he not a hero of the war? Is he not strong and perfect and well-spoken? Is he not fit for adoption into the royal family and to one day reign in our name?" And had her father not smiled?

Then she had journeyed to the sea with the broad-shouldered soldier, as was the custom, and at his gentle command had surrendered her virginal dignities and her innocence, and lowered her loincloth of finest while linen as a long-besieged city lowers its flag.

The day came when they returned, with her body humming as if a vast bell that, having been struck, sang a note too low for human ears. They returned to find her father had laid a foundation. And it stretched far, and when completed would engulf its neighbor pyramids and reduce them to mere ornaments. Her mind reeled with admiration for her father's ambition. And so she danced her joy and she leaped, pointing one set of her toes straight to the sky in a single, exalted moment of supreme human beauty.

But she had leaped too far in her elation, and on her landing broke her smallest toe. It was broken in a way that could never quite be healed for all the royal physicians' wisdom. Nef wept for herself. She wept not because it hurt, for she was a Pharaoh's daughter and courage ran through her veins, and this was but a little hurt. Nef wept because her body's perfection was no more, and she knew that in her moment aloft, she had been perfect and would be so never more. And Nef knew, she had always known in her mind but knew now in her bones and her heart, that one day as she had surrendered her maidenhood so must she surrender her life, and would never live to see her father's work done.

Nef peered down past her shabby toes, feet bound tightly in linen and honey, feet that had not parted company since before Socrates drank bitter cold from his bowl, at this girl whose body was so achingly like hers as she had seen in her mirror. Yet she saw fear in the girl's face, for the girl saw in Nef what she must become, in but a wink of time's eye. The girl had no ear for Nef's wisdom. And for the first in lifetimes, the family's eldest knew sadness.

* * *

"And though I grant young Gia is as upright and moral as you say, she lacks courage."

"You know what happens if I don't have a strong hand at the wheel!" Christine protested, a foreign note of pleading in her voice.

"She is intolerant and closed-minded. She simply doesn't belong here."

"She's that bad?"

* * *

Gia was watering the rosebushes along the driveway when she noticed the cat watching her. Gia would have expected a black cat, but this one gleamed like bronze with black spots in the porch light. In shape and color it looked just like an ancient statue.

"Wow! You're a beauty, aren't you?" Gia said. It was silly to talk to a cat, of course, but less silly than most of her tattered life. "I've never seen your like. What are you, an Abbysinian?" She put down the garden hose and reached down to pet it, but the cat hissed at her and dashed off, leaving Gia feeling vaguely depressed.

A few minutes of watering later, Gia heard, "Mau," and noticed the cat had returned to stare at her from atop a fence.

"Pretty voice," Gia commented.

"She's not an Abyssinian; she's an Egyptian Mau," the cat stated.

"Of course the cats talk here. Why the hell not?" Gia said calmly.

"No they don't," the cat countered. "You keep busy, don't you."

Gia thought briefly of an old storybook where a lost girl had conversed with a grinning feline. "It... kills the time."

"Y'know, you might pass the time by meeting some of the people here. They have a lot to offer."

"Not interested," Gia said curtly.

"Fine by me! I've been watching you all day-"

"Night," Gia corrected.

"Nobody here likes you either. Even Anuba here doesn't like you, and she likes everybody."

"Ah! You must be Cecy."

"Only now? Really?" Gia had never heard such disdain poured into two syllables. "What does she see in you? Well don't worry. Tiffy will get bored soon enough and you can go. Do you like driving her?"

"I hate it," Gia said, her voice chirpy and cheerful. "I hate the things she shows me when the sun sets. I hate the weird things she tells me to do."

"I see."

"But I'll admit it's an education. I'm learning about things I didn't even know existed." She shut off the spigot. She didn't particularly care if the water ran until the old house it was attached to sank into a morass, but such compulsions were part of the so-called adulthood she'd been granted. "And I like her."

"Oh?" Cecy sounded honestly surprised. "Do you really?"

"I like her voice. It's silky and strong. And the things she says, I can tell she's very old and wise, and that she cares for me, despite herself."

"Tom told you to do that, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"And so you hafta do it. Why, I could say, 'Gia, pour water all over your head,' and you couldn't do otherwise."

Gia grunted. It wasn't a question, so she wasn't compelled to answer. But she did turn the spigot back on.

"She just feels sorry for you. Somebody put a little scissor up your nose and went 'snip snip,' didn't they?"

Gia whirled and jetted water all over the cat. Cecy and Anuba yowled as one and vanished into the night.

* * *

"You have been my sister ever since we adopted you and yours. But my husband is lord of this house, and he's even less pleased than I am."

"Alright," the car said, defeated. "Tell her we're leaving tomorrow at sunset."

The matriarch finished her tea, satisfied that her regrettable duty had been fulfilled.

"...and that I'm not happy with her," Tiffy growled, "at all."

* * *

The next morning, though it was really the evening, Gia woke up and washed and straightened her clothes. The fear was gone. They were leaving, and she'd escaped yet another nightmare.

Christine was "not impressed with her behavior." She was in for it, and she'd eventually need to patch things up, but Gia wasn't feeling particularly eager to do so. What did the car expect of her anyway, dropping her into the middle of this snake's nest, this carnival freak show? Gia glared at herself in the mirror, at the ugly smile that mocked her.

Then the amazing thing happened, the unexpected thing, the catastrophic and inexplicable and in its way, miraculous thing. There was a terrible noise, an earthquake, and an impact that shook Gia's gut. She opened the bathroom door to see the family, a part of her mind struggling to catalogue and in some cases even comprehend the things she beheld, rushing toward the front door. She waited, not daring to get caught in that crush, that black torrent, until the threshold was clear.

Gia exited the house to see the family assembled upon the wide steps leading up to the front door, and scattered just beyond it, all staring.

Across the road leading to their driveway, a train track slithered impossibly where none had been before, complete with crossing bells and gates. The red Plymouth lay just to one side of them, shattered and twisted into a half-spiral, her spine broken.

"Tisiphone," whispered the crowd, almost as one.

"Tiffy," said the tall matriarch softly, amazed in her sudden grief.

"Christine!" Gia howled. _How odd! I see her lying in a mangled heap and now I care about her?_

Their eyes followed the tracks and the dusty black boxcars to where a pig-iron locomotive had come to a stop, its chuffing, smoking engine shaking itself to awkward rest, its massive cow-catcher not even dented.

They watched as a gaunt bearded man in an old-fashioned waistcoat and string necktie descended from the stairs in its side. The man tipped his top hat to the father of the Elliott clan, and said with a wicked smirk, "Such a pity! We've come a long way, and you all just missed something of a grand entrance, even by my standards."

Gia read, half in shock, the legend carved in brass cursive letters on the engine's coal-black side - _Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show._ Improbably enough, the engine emitted the clanging music of a calliope.

"There's one in every family," Gia heard the father growl.

And the Elliots fell upon her as a dark wave to sweep her back inside.

.


	7. Chapter 7

.

* * *

_**One of Us, Part Two.**_

_**- Family Matter**_

* * *

"You really shouldn't be looking out there."

But look Gia did, while the sun arced over the sky and burned away the morning fog from the hissing green wall of spruce trees surrounding the house.

She watched as workmen pounded and hammered, wrenched and jiggered, ran and shouted. Down went tent pegs, up went poles. Folded canvas blossomed like tulip buds into great candy-colored tents. Ingenious machines unfurled and unfolded like flags until they rose, defiant, against the sky. Cables unspooled and generators ignited, and in one case shorted, sending burly men scrambling and Gia into a sudden fit of laughing, and almost ruining their day's work before it shut down and fumed.

Then the sun retired and set the oncoming fog bank afire with pinks and purples and oranges as if the traveling carnival had spilled sherbet in the sky, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show sparked and jolted like Frankenstein's monster until - it was alive! Lights flared and danced and machines spun and shook and whirled like electric pinwheels, like a troupe of gymnasts dressed in rainbows. Monster tents that had sprouted like giant evil mushrooms hid secrets and fascinations announced by recorded barkers. The stars themselves, envious of the display, withdrew behind the fog for the night to sulk.

Gia watched, for she was locked and barricaded inside a house haunted thrice-over. Between her and the sane world lay a besieging ring of wheels and tops and tents, and around it a white lattice wall of wooden struts and supports and the great swooping line of the roller coaster – impossible to erect that in a day, yet there it stood like a giant spiderweb – and beyond all that, endless night forest and churning, hungry bog, fog, frost, darkness and desolation. Pandemonium and shadows; cougars, and the dark.

_Gia, are you really wanting to ride the rides? Are you really curious to see what's in those tents? You're craving popcorn and soda pop? Hah! So the child inside you lives still, despite the best efforts of the grownups to scoop her out of your skull like so much ice cream._

The Ferris wheel cartwheeled mere yards from her window. She could see children laughing and smiling in the cars. Sometimes one would wave to her; she didn't wave back.

_Where do the children come from? _Gia wondered. This house hid itself within a wetland reserve, a valley set aside for trees, birds, frogs and leeches, undisturbed by blundering humanity. _Is that what becomes of Mr. Dark's victims? Blinded by bright lights, deafened by jangling calliope, subsisting on mummy-flavored cotton candy, riding the rides past joy, past nausea, past boredom until they become automatons cheering on cue? Then up, into the boxcars again like cattle, shut inside and off?_ Gia shuddered. _Like Christine with her phantom passengers, ghosts trapped inside for eternity – the whole carnival! _

She'd been good and scared of the Elliott family before, and now they guarded her just outside this little room from whatever candy-land demon relative had conjured all of that from a handful of boxcars in a day, and had frightened even them.

"Y'know," Tom said with his warm drawl, "when we came here we had to knock holes in these walls to get some windows. Even we need a little ventilation. Some of us, anyway. Now I kinda wish we hadn't bothered. Gia, you really should _not_ be looking out there."

And Gia decided he was right. She yanked the curtains down, though that didn't stop the music and noise, or the lights from painting the room into a fun house. Gia and Tom waited together in the onetime nursery.

"They've been in there a long time," Tom commented, again.

The family. When they saw Christine smashed into a red and silver corkscrew and Mister Dark descend from his great black engine, the family had turned upon her and swept her back inside their antique house. Then the elders vanished into the dining room and shut the doors for a conference.

"They're protecting me," Gia said, raising her voice to be heard over the dratted music. "Why?"

"You being Ms. Tisiphone's driver, you've probably noticed the family abides by certain principles?"

_The rules._ "Yup."

"Mrs. Elliott promised you'd be safe in here, and that's hospitality. That Mister Dark, he should know better. If I know the mister and missus, they're madder'n hornets."

Abruptly, the expression on Tom's face changed, and the warmth and twang in his voice faded. "Gia, you are wanted in the dining room." Then Cecy vanished and Tom the caretaker was himself again.

"Well, we better take you downstairs."

"She do that to you all the time?"

"Sure! Keeps us close."

They descended the stairway. "Not the end of her talents either. Y'know, she put Ms. Tisiphone and her sisters into cars in the first place. They overtaxed themselves in a war, long story. She started 'em off in Ford Fairlanes. Traded up to the Plymouths a few years later."

She caught sight of a dark-skinned savage with an oversize head and filed teeth pacing in front of the door, gibbering and grumbling to itself in some barbaric language, itching for something, anything, to try getting past him. The thing was... only a foot tall... and made of wood. _More of Cecy's work?_ Gia slapped a hand over her mouth, though whether to suppress a laugh or a scream she couldn't say.

They entered the dining room and Tom, ever the country gentleman, held a chair for her, then left and shut the door. Gia was alone in the room with "the mister and missus." The lady sat, her equally tall, gaunt and imposing husband stood apart, reading from a book.

"Young lady," the woman began. "I'm sure you're aware you've caused us some trouble."

Gia nodded. "I'm grateful for your hospitality."

The woman smiled coldly. "You should also be aware that you drew this trouble here."

"Me?"

"Tiffany didn't properly prepare you. You were frightened of us."

_Hell yes! _But Gia kept silent.

"That fear brought Caius. He and his attendants feed upon such things."

"You cannot stay," the husband abruptly rumbled. "A family must not be set against itself."

"Yes dear," the matron nodded in deference to her husband. "Gia, we're going to have to ask you to leave."

"I see. So... death-carnival and beyond that an endless bog—"

"We do not plan to throw you out the front door!" the matriarch interrupted testily. "Cecy has sent for uncle Einar. He'll come tomorrow morning. You're not very heavy so he should be able to fly you as far as Millinocket. From there you can take a bus south to Derry or Castle Rock and thence to wherever you'd like."

"Until then, stay indoors. You're safe with us," the master of the house added. He was taking pains to appear not at all interested in the conversation but, Gia noted, he was listening.

"Wait a minute now, what about Christine?"

"What of her?" the matron said.

"She's like a shark. If she can't run or feed, she can't heal! That backwards odometer of hers."

"But I was given to understand you no longer wish to be her driver."

"Huh! Cecy's a gossip."

The matriarch scowled.

"And she went and told Christine, didn't she?" Gia scowled right back.

"Tiff's already safely back in her garage. We take care of our own, but it will take some time before she's awake, let alone well."

"Wait... so you're telling me... I can go? Not travel with Christine anymore?"

"Isn't that what you want?"

Gia sat back in her chair, flummoxed. This was unexpected.

_I can be free? I could leave all the bad weirdness behind. No more night-riding in the haunted car, no more blood, no more ordeals._

_Then what...?_

_No. I'm not like Nell, hiding in her house because she can't find the guts to do anything else!_

_But... what?_

"What do I want? Ma'am, I don't have an answer to that question. You know about what happened to me," here Gia pointed to her own head, and the woman nodded.

"I've been letting Christine make my decisions for me ever since. My... what if my judgment's impaired? Ma'am, sir, you think you're opening up a cage, and thank you. But the real cage is here. How do I get out? You can never escape yourself."

The woman cocked an eyebrow. "That is wisely said. Pity is never more than cold comfort. Still... how may we help you, young lady?"

"I don't know."

"You have until morning to decide," the man rumbled.

* * *

_**A family must not be set against itself.**_

* * *

Gia sat on the stairs, watching the pacing gibbering wild-man doll watch her, until Tom came and sat beside her.

"They said I brought Dark here."

Tom grunted.

"Because I was afraid."

"Yeah, he feeds on that. For what it's worth I'm scared of him too. Y'see, the two of us, three countin' you now, we're the only normals around here."

"Normalcy's questionable for me, and growing more so daily. Who's the third?"

Tom nodded. "Timothy. He knows a lot more about Dark than me. You promise to behave yourself, I could introduce you."

Gia watched as Tom climbed the stairs, reached up and pulled a cord. Down came a new, smaller set of stairs. "After you..."

They climbed into the attic, now converted into a loft. Two people waited inside. One, an elfin-thin woman, lay under a thin sheet atop raven-black hair that wove and lapped like the sea at night all the way down to her feet. The hair nearest her head became progressively grayer, and Gia saw a sleeping middle-aged face, but bearing very few of the folds and crinkles of age.

The bed was extraordinary, a four-poster canopy over a solid box the size of a queen mattress, filled almost to the top with sand. _Do they stow her up here because she likes the air, or to keep Anuba out?_

"Cecy?" Gia guessed. "She's beautiful."

Tom nodded, taking a brush and idly stroking her long hair. "She's not often here, though. She likes traveling too much. Don't disturb her until mealtimes. And over here's—"

"Hello," interrupted a cheerful oaken croak of a voice, an elderly voice, yet warm and bubbling like hot cider. The second person was an old man sitting in a big easy-chair in a corner, beside a desk. He waved.

His hair was white, as white as his button-down shirt. He once had, Gia could tell, a kindly face, though venerable years had melted him like a waxwork dummy, until the handsome face spilled flesh over his stiff collar, until shoulders sagged and belly inflated like one of Dark's balloons.

_I promised to behave myself, and he's not scary at all. A little sad, maybe. _"Hello, sir." She actually tried the curtsy again, _much better this time. _"Pleased to meet you, mister Elliott."

The old man answered her curtsy with a nod and a broader smile, waiting.

"Miss Gia," Tom explained. "I should have asked if you can type. Timothy's gone stone deaf, and the best way's if you can type to him."

Mr. Timothy Elliott sat near a creaky Underwood. Gia approached the arcane contraption - _this thing must be ages old! _– and stared in distress at the keyboard, for the letters had all worn away, scoured clean.

"My fingers have walked a lot of miles," old Timothy shouted jovially. "Are you Gia?"

Gia sat down and gave it her best effort. The snip-clatter of the type bars soothed her, driving away the mad clanging of the carnival with its sensible, efficient clips. The thing was awful to use, took a lot of effort from her fingers, but its woodpecker sound, though she'd never heard it before, somehow called back a time long gone.

"Im verry peased tro meet you sir," she typed. "Can you telll me abuot that carnival out tfere?"

Timothy's smile disappeared. "Right to business, eh? They've come for me, I expect. And for Tom." The man called out as if trying to out-shout the calliope music he couldn't hear. "As you can see, I'm old. I could go tomorrow or next year or last another quiet decade, It's strange, being old. I remember running wild on sunny summer days. Look at me, girl: bottle up spring and summer so you can uncork the vintages in winter - that's the way!"

The man gulped some water from a glass. _He's not doing so bad, given his age, _Gia thought. _He still has a young man's eyes and a young man's smile._

"Don't overtire yourself now," Tom warned through the typewriter.

Old Timothy waved him away. "No Tom, this is important. My caretaker here, he fusses over me too much. Where was I? The carnival. They tempt and they prey. Old men like me, we're easy targets for the Autumn People, afraid of Mister Dark if we haven't lived life. 'Come and be a kid again,' he'll whisper in our ears, and before a man knows it he has us. I think - mind, I don't know but I believe – they cozy up to our misery, drink our tears and eat our discarded bandages. But that's how you beat 'em: laugh right in their faces! Mirth and happiness makes you less appetizing."

"Im in troubel then," Gia typed. "Im not a vary happy prison."

"All kids your age think their problems are huge. What? Just 'cause you look a little funny? Girl, you have your youth and that pretty head of hair. You should grow it out like our Cecy there. And you just remember your folks and how much they care for you."

Timothy had said this innocently, but his smile faded immediately at her wince. "Oh dear! I said something wrong, didn't I? Don't get on with your family, I guess?"

Gia shook her head.

"Sorry. I just take it for granted. Mom and dad found me on a porch in a wicker basket. Dickens for my headrest and Shakespeare at my tiny feet. I'll tell you a secret." His smile had returned and grown conspiratorial. "Odd people like this family, they need Tom and me. They need an audience! Take flying. A wonder of course, but without a wingless foster nephew to applaud you, you start taking it for granted. Without a couple of normal folks batting about, what fun is it being eccentric?" He winked.

Gia laughed at the jolly, twinkly-eyed old man.

"...or living forever? Another secret: this family, be frightened of them if you wrong 'em, sure! But the truth, the great truth about all the chain-rattlers and night-moaners and gimlet-eyes... they want to help you grow up into a brave young man or woman. Once you do, they fade away. I packed up and left when I was a teenager. Then one day not so long later, you're old, and you remember them and they're your friends after all, and were all along, 'cause you couldn't have gotten through the scary times without them. You're too young to understand that, I think. Anyway that's their job. Because the world can be a scary place, and would be more so without them, without their help."

Gia shook her head and typed, "i think I folllow." She paused. Then, "Mrs Elliott wants someone to fly me out of here But the carnies theyre not onna just give up are they?"

"Perhaps not," Timothy conceded. "Mister Dark is very patient. He has all the time in the world."

* * *

_**Bottle up spring and summer...**_

_**...uncork the vintages in winter.**_

* * *

Gia sat at the top of the stairs, watching the strange wooden man pace back and forth before the front door.

_By sunup, this "uncle Einar" will arrive and fly me away from Christine and away from this house. He'll take me back to civilization and I'll be free of all this._

_Why is my gut coiling around itself like a spooked snake?_

_Gia, your pride's getting in your way. You are mentally impaired! You've got to accept that you need help simply to survive._

_But do I need Christine? _

_You can't make it alone, and she's the only one volunteering. And she's strong. If anybody hurts you she'll trample 'em. You like her and you'd miss her. If only she'd stop using you as bait...!_

_What am I to her, anyway? A convenience so she doesn't have to watch the road? A worm for her hook?_

"I'll have a long heart-to-heart with her," Gia promised herself. _She can bawl me out all she wants for being rude to her family. I pretty much deserve it._

_Then that's settled. Problem is Mr. Elliott's going to insist you leave in a very few hours because you've brought Dark and his carnies. You're dividing the family and you're endangering old Mister Timothy and Tom. And that will be the end. What to do?_

_Why, Mr. Dark has to go!_

_Yes, that's all there is to it. It's him or me, isn't it? Timothy said I can beat the carnies by laughing in their faces. Sure, I can do that._

_And if I lose, oh God! If they catch me, they'll throw me into the freak show tent, to be petted and fussed over by the bearded lady and the thalidomide man. Step right up! See Gia the puppet girl, who must always obey your every command with a bright smile. Come tell her to bite the head off a live chicken! _

Hell! Hell stacked upon hell until the groaning pile falls through the floor into a new, tenth circle.

_Are you really willing to wager that? Gia, are you that crazy?_

She looked at the latches on the door, and mentally rehearsed the most efficient way to unlock them.

_I'm officially insane._

Gia walked down the steps toward the now-suspicious savage. Abruptly she leaped onto a chair and pointed. "Eeeek! A rat!"

_Sometimes the simplest tricks are the best._

The fierce thing yowled and dashed off after the uncatchable-because-imaginary rodent, while Gia stepped off the chair, unlatched the door and was out and shutting it just before the fearsome little ankle-biter could tackle her. _Schmuck!_

She turned and the carnival lay before her, a busy portrait of bright lights framing the impeccable carousel placed right in the middle of the driveway.

If Gia hadn't known all she knew, she'd have been delighted. The carnival was old, perhaps even dangerous-old, and old fashioned, yes. But no one her age could resist the whirling, flashing lights and the tumbling acrobats, or the strange mingling scents of tiger and elephant and popcorn.

Except this was the October Carnival, and if she wasn't extremely careful she'd never leave it. The merry-go-round, she noted, rotated in reverse, and immediately Gia thought of Christine's backwards-running odometer. _Aha, I get it. Very cute._

Then she heard the crash of glass and saw the savage gabbling demon-doll hanging onto the shards, climbing out. _Oh no, that I do not need! _Gia leaped from the stairs and into the crowd.

The children and teenagers she found surrounding her appeared normal, but there was something brittle about their cheer, artificial and too squeaky-clean. It was as if she'd stepped into a Norman Rockwell painting of a carnival. _Reality's messier than this!_

She ducked past the rocking pirate ship, zipped around the Zipper and dashed around the Tilt-a-Whirl. _Track me now, you ugly doll!_

First sight of the Hall of Mirrors set her antennae twitching. _Ooooh no, not going in there!_ And then she saw - him.

Mr. Dark was a monster.

The family had warned her. When Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show had wheeled its ugly black locomotive onto their front lawn, they'd bum-rushed her back inside with dire warnings. What could so frighten this mad family of spooks and hobgoblins? Why, the charismatic Mister Caius Gates Dark, of course. She'd overheard their whispers: corrupter and fiend, marionetteer of corpses, painter of death's head moths, ringmaster and illustrated man, whatever all that meant! And here he towered like a utility pole over her in his clotted-red vest and glittering caviar suit, studying her with trapdoor-spider eyes.

Gia burst out laughing!

Gales, whoops and cheers, which became increasingly shrill and hysterical and finally faded to an impotent nothing while Mr. Dark checked his pocket watch.

"Welcome to the show!" Mr. Dark began. His resonant voice, polished as a black widow's backside, marked him as a member of this aristocratic family. "I believe you have been misinformed. May I presume someone fed you the erroneous rumor that I disliked the sound of laughter? In honesty, do you suppose I should have built a carnival if that was so?"

"I was told you feed on fear and misery."

"No, those are called lawyers. Miss Gia, if I abhorred cheer, would it not have served me better to manage a mortuary, or perhaps a hospital?"

_It didn't work. _Gia remained silent. _Oh, now I'm in for it!_

"Pardon. Before we continue, how's Robert?"

"They said he'll be laid-up for weeks, but he'll be fine."

"I'm glad. A family matter, you understand." He gave her a wink. "Shall I give you the tour? I'm certain Mr. Electrico would- hmm... I noticed the attention you gave our Hall of Mirrors. Step right this way."

Gia's breath caught. She saw herself in the mirrors, walking toward the entrance on command with that awful disembodied feeling. She saw a crone, and with a horrid shock realized it was her. She saw a young girl she'd not seen for years, because she'd only seen her in a mirror. All these and more. She gasped - herself just before the operation!

The music stopped, and it felt as if the entire carnival held its breath all at once.

"Aha! What you want is in there - I can always tell. Free pass for our guest!" At the ringmaster's cue one of the carnies opened the gate for her. She watched her legs ascending the stairs, unable to stop. Not... wanting to stop, not really. All she'd endured, how much worse could this be?

An arctic wind caressed her cheek. _So cold in there...!_

It was the calliope that saved her.

A new song filled the hush... and Gia remembered Christine playing it, an old song even for her. Gia'd been gloomy after the massacre at Zachry, so Christine had played her antique melodies and told Gia to sing along. She'd had no choice but to sing as best she could, until despite herself she started having fun.

_Those days full of pleasure, we now fondly treasure..._

Gia had batted her silly head back and forth, tapped the rhythm on the steering wheel, and joined her voice to the car's. Whatever else one might say about the Furies, they could sing!

"When we never thought it a crime... stealing cherries..." Gia sang softly.

Mr. Dark lurched away as if scalded. Surprise and rage twisted his handsome face.

Gia halted herself. Hope tapped its baton in her heart and woke up a full orchestra. _Oh, of course!_

_Christine wanted to cheer me up. She wanted me to be happy._

"With faces brown as berries," Gia sang out. "Good old summer time!"

Dark fell back as if she'd aimed a pistol at his head.

_Because she does care, evil thing that she is. And she brought me here because I have no family. She's trying to give me hers, and I pushed them away._

"You hold her hand and she holds yours, and that's a very good sign..."

Gia's voice caught. She felt a tear escape her eye. _Oh big sister, I've been awful!_

Mr. Dark and his minions withdrew from her. They could tolerate laughter and singing and joy. Such was their bait, after all. But love? Love could conquer them - the love of a father for a son, the love of lifelong friends no matter how brief the lifetimes, or the love of an orphan abruptly realizing she had found a family.

And even one single tear fallen from a suddenly brimful and overflowing heart – that was toxic, bitterest poison to the Autumn People.

The carousel stopped. Coaster cart halted mid-scream. All froze.

All, except the fairground organ. It played on. _And life is one beautiful rhyme._

She felt hands upon her shoulders. Startled, she turned to find a war-party at her back, the Elliott family, led by the perpetually raging little Zuni-doll. Mrs. Elliott wrapped a black shawl about Gia's shoulders and gave Mr. Dark as severe a scowl as ever a mother gave a naughty child. But the glare transmuted into confusion as she beheld the recoiling carnival and the tear gracing Gia's cheek.

The woman looked from Gia to Dark, and back, and then she smiled a smile bright as moonlight. "I see," she said with a voice like wind through trees, and she nodded.

She gave a look to her husband, who also seemed confused at first, until at last the dullard male understood the mystery the two females had shared. He nodded his assent.

With that, Gia hugged the tall, corseted woman with a grateful little sob.

"Well, there's nothing for it," Mrs. Elliott pronounced, resigned and indulgent. "Adoption it is."

"You're joking!" Mr. Dark sputtered.

"Cousin," Mr. Elliott proclaimed as he strode forward on stork-legs, "It is well past time you picked up your toys and came inside. You're disturbing the rest of the family."

Mr. Dark's face purpled with rage. "No, I don't think so. I believe I shall be on my way!" He spun on his polished black jackboots and began shouting orders to his sycophants. With well-practiced, automatic moves, they shut off the power and reached for their tools.

As the carnival's lights flickered and vanished, Gia, now happily wrapped in Mrs. Elliott's arms, peeked out and noticed something lurking in the fog. Her heart leaped.

She searched around and found another such something lurking opposite the first. _Oh! Oh now that's perfect, what timing! Cecy got my message to you and you came, bless you both!_

She gently withdrew from the warm bat-wing embrace of her new foster mother, and shouted, "And just where do you think you're going... Caius?"

Dark whirled. It was too much, her using his familiar name like that. "What!" he snarled back.

"When you arrived, you ran that ugly locomotive of yours right over Christine. You do know what that means?"

Mr. Dark cocked an eyebrow.

_You don't quite get it yet, do you? _"...Maggie? ...Abbie?"

Then Mr. C. G. Dark's glittering wasps'-eyes suit flashed with the glare of four powerful halogens beaming from twin Plymouths. Gia's own eyes reflected Alecto and Magiera's beams like headlamps, impaling the sisters' prey.

"Why, it means you've shed kindred blood."

* * *

_**The Furies will not be denied.**_

* * *

"A family matter," Gia snarked when it was over. "You understand." Then she looked down at the savage little wooden creature at her feet. "And this family's gonna take some getting used-to." But the fierce doll had vanished.

"Truly?" Mrs. Elliott deadpanned. "I was just thinking how perfectly you're fitting in."

That was almost the end. Mr. Elliott informed Gia rather dryly that honor wouldn't be satisfied until the doll had at least counted coup. Reputation was at stake, after all. Three mad dashes around the house and one victory dance later, the family had been duly entertained, Gia had been disciplined for rudeness and He Who Kills had fairly claimed a lock of Gia's hair. Such was her initiation.

Mr. Dark did not perish either. But even he found having a steel-belted radial peeling out over his head persuasive. The carnival vanished before the sunrise. The train tracks waited until no one was looking before they too disappeared, like a child's toy train put back into its box.

* * *

Gia slept very soundly indeed until the sun set. She awoke to the rumbles and thumps of the stirring family. Mama Elliott soon appeared to invite her to breakfast, and chided her for not making her bed.

"Why, one would think you were raised by truckers."

"No ma'am."

"I understand the very idea of a finishing school has vanished in these benighted times." Mama Elliott tapped a finger on the tip of Gia's nose. "You are going to be such fun to make-over."

Gia giggled. Being trifled with like a child would have rankled, except her stepmother had confided her age.

"Both Robert and Tiffany awoke this afternoon. They want to welcome you to the family as soon as you've eaten. Then Tom will need your help with the chores, dear."

"Yes ma'am." Gia also noted warmly that her new family made their wishes known while scrupulously avoiding direct orders.

She finished with her bed and paused for a moment inside the little once-nursery. She'd need to add some personal touches. Fortunately the massive house boasted plenty of furniture, paintings and books to choose from. She looked the room over, and the smile on her face had nothing at all to do with surgeries.

Her own room, in her own home.

"No dawdling, now." And Gia hurried out the door.

* * *

_**Dedicated to Robert Kerr**_

_**- The Caretaker**_

* * *

.


	8. Chapter 8

.

* * *

_**Dog Run**_

_**- Taking the Scenic Route**_

* * *

Deep in a particularly remote and inhospitable corner of a bog that could swallow half of Birmingham with a happy belch, much to the benefit of the rest of the country, hid a cheerfully repainted mansion, with a whitewashed three-car garage alongside it. Inside the garage squatted a massive obsolete lump of pressed steel and paint that currently looked as much like an unmade bed as an automobile, and slowly dripped oil onto what had been a spotless waxed concrete floor.

A waif named Gia, whose face looked like someone had been chewing on it and whose adopted mother had taken to dressing up in black bows, embroidered white lace and anything else that might appeal to you "Loli" pervs, you know who you are, sat inside the car arguing. The voice that talked back to her from the car's speakers was usually not somebody you wanna bully if you like not being roadkill, but at the moment it sounded more like a weak and hoarse and much put-upon hospital patient.

"I'm not firing on all cylinders, Gia. Could you go over that again?"

Gia took an impatient breath and jabbed each word out one at a time. "I'm having this awful recurring dream, about Kino. You remember her?"

"Naturally," the car intoned ominously.

"So I asked Cecy to track her down. She found her, well west of us, and she's fine except... she's headed straight for a real bad place."

"That would be the badlands," Christine growled. "And Cecy didn't warn her because...?"

"The Rules. She can't reveal herself like that to—"

"Yeah yeah, got it. She'd endanger the whole family. So... because you and Kino jumped in the sack once upon a time, you're now obligated to go charging off to her rescue? Helloooo, sexy supervillain to scrappy minion - not our job!"

"What is our job, anyway?"

"Revenge. And if you're right, I could just sit here recuperating and get my revenge all at once."

"What've you got against her?"

"Well, nothin' anymore, 'cept she's Hermes' sidekick." The car spoke the name like an epithet. "Let him take care of her."

Gia pushed some dangling roof-vinyl out of her eyes and stared out of the big honkin' hole where a windshield should be. "You'd just sit here while a good and decent person dies?"

"Good and decent people die all the... aw hell, you're not gonna let me sit here and heal, are you?" the voice moaned. The ignition fired, then fired again, until finally the engine turned over and rattled and sputtered back to life, filling the garage with a haze of gray smoke.

"I do not believe I'm doing this! C'mon, let's git before your mama comes out and takes you over her knee."

That's how, in the middle of the night, the car and its worried driver trundled off into the murky fog that surrounded Casa de Elliott on an almost nightly basis, listing well off to starboard the whole way.

The driver squinted at the road not five meters ahead, and pushed forward at a maddeningly slow pace. A backfire banged out of the tailpipe.

"'Scuze me," the car apologised. "Gia, if we're gonna get there in time to do any good, we're gonna hafta cut right through the heart of the badlands.

The driver didn't answer.

"You could get killed. Hell, probably get killed. Shape I'm in, _I_ might just get killed."

"You can die?"

"Most living things can if you abuse 'em hard enough."

They continued forward.

"Gia Elliott, you are _not_ in love with that shitter, are you?"

"Kino? Well not..." Gia hesitated. "We only met once! But... I really liked her..."

_"Gia Elliott," strange how quickly I got used to it. Is identity that malleable?_

The voice from the AV system kvetched. "What am I doing? I'm turning us around. I'm turning us around right now and going home. This is stupid."

They continued forward.

"Aaarrgghh!" the car aaarrgghhed. Not for the first time, the entity haunting the old Plymouth wished she still had a head so she could beat it against something.

They continued forward.

* * *

So, the badlands. Christine explained it to her driver best she could, but I can tell you better. Who'm I? I've been in the writing biz since the fifties and you've not read my stuff? Bet you watched some on the glass teat before I swore off writing for it. Go on, go find an anthology, "Harlequin" or "I Must Scream" or something. I'm everywhere, except maybe Barnes and Noble 'cause they don't carry anything anymore except goddamn Harry Potter and Twilight. Y'know, I'd pay serious money to see Van Helsing or Buffy or somebody drive a wooden tentpole right up that punk's scrawny emo high school butt. Maybe I'll write it. Anyway, go find some of my work. I'll wait.

Dum dum de dum...

...okay, you back? Learn some respect, kiddo? Good. Now, where were we? The Badlands!

Right, put a few thermonuclear weapons into the hands of some self-important power-hungry goofballs and watch the inevitable. Now wait a few hundred years so the place gets marginally habitable again. The sterile underground societies start kicking their malcontents topside, a few vagabonds drift in from the edges, no law and order and not enough food. And there's our dog-eared Fury, idling rough in the afternoon light, right on the edge of miles upon miles of that.

* * *

"There're artificial intelligences here that will trap you in their torture-sims forever," Christine warned. "Subterranean dystopias, roving gangs, and cannibals, and—"

"After the pestholes you've been dropping me off in, it's about time I drove you through a place you don't like." Gia sassed back.

"Gia, I was so happy when the family adopted you. I really liked having you as my driver. I'm gonna miss you."

Gia tapped her finger on the bent steering wheel irritably. "Just watch me live through this, too!" She hit the gas. The car shuddered and kicked up dust on the road as it roared forward.

"Well, too late to turn around now," the voice lamented. "Don't try. All that dust behind us is radioactive."

Gia's eyes bulged a bit when she took this little safety tip in.

"Y'know, there are easier ways to commit suicide."

"Maybe we should die," Gia murmured.

"...What did you just say?"

"Christine, you kill people."

"Sure do! Eat 'em up like the Big Bad Wolf."

"What am I doing, staying with you?"

"You're part of the family now. They told me you wanted to stay, that you fought cousin Dark to stay with me. I thought we were done with this! Why, of all times, are you agonizing about this - now?"

The AV crackled to life. "See-cue-bee two-four-one, this is collision control," an unfamiliar, flat and mechanical voice spoke. "Clearance for duel requested."

"Oh hell...!" Christine groaned. "Here we go."

"What's that?" Gia asked, at about the moment she heard the rumble of a turbocharged engine behind them.

"CQB 241, this is collision control. Respond please," the automated voice polite and distant, the antithesis of Christine's steamy tones.

"Collision control, this is CQB 241. We are heavily armed," Christine lied, "but we're gonna decline at this time."

Gia stared as strange letters appeared on the AV's screen.

_U boze in OMGWTF car LOLcopters elevendyone u in bigdogz turf say bye bye._

"The heck is-"

"Shush!" the car commanded.

_B-hold 1337 skilzors! Haxxorz CC! Pwned!_

"Christine...?" Gia tried to interject.

"This is collision control. Opponent confirms. Freeway underwriters have cross-filed you as mutual beneficiaries."

"Collision control," Christine shouted. "Override! We wish to decline!"

"Please observe standard traffic regulations, and good luck."

"Christine!"

"What?"

"Save your breath. This guy 'Big Dog,' he's hacked collision control."

"...you can read that gibberish...?"

_ROTFLMAO1111_

"Now he's laughing at us."

At that moment, Gia heard a clatter behind her, then immediately _after_ heard the thunder of supersonic gunfire. She abruptly noticed the bullet holes in Christine's freshly regrown windshield.

"No, no no!" Christine bellowed.

"He's shooting at us!" Gia shouted back.

"I know! Gia, floor it!"

Gia stomped the throttle, and reached for the red button attached to the car's aftermarket shifter. She heard the hiss, then the car bucked forward, slamming her into the seat. The heavily modified V-8 under their hood roared.

The voice howled something unintelligible.

"I'm so glad I don't speak any of those languages!" Gia shouted over the noise.

"I'm being held together with duck tape and old chicken wire and you just gotta drive us into the badlands!"

_Wooot!_ appeared on the AV's screen. _U old carz sleeper. GG!_

In the current absence of a rear-view mirror, Gia looked backwards and saw only the empty desert. "I think we lost 'em," she shouted over the noise.

"Enough with the nitrous!" the car pleaded.

Gia pulled the button... and nothing happened. "It's jammed."

"WHAT?"

"The injector. Control's jammed."

The voice yowled in panic. Then, "tank's under the passenger seat. Twist the nozzle! Twist the nozzle! Shut it down! No no, the other way! Other! Way!"

Gia rotated the nozzle until the engine's roaring died down, only to look up and see a turn just ahead. She hit the brakes, and managed to skid sideways into the curve and accelerate out. Gia heard a high-pitched scream over the noise.

They decelerated to a sane pace, and Gia took a moment to congratulate herself for stumbling through such an impossible maneuver.

"Do I look like a drift racer to you, girl?" Christine sounded like she was almost in tears.

"You screamed," Gia gloated. "That was a little girl scream."

"Have you lost your mind?" the voice cracked.

"How does it feel," Gia grinned tightly, "to be the target of somebody else's revenge for once."

"This! Is not! The Time! Gia—"

"Why not? You've been tormenting me, dumping me off in those horrid places."

"I don't want to lose you!"

Gia blinked.

"You could get shot here, don't you understand?"

They drove in silence for a while.

"There's a rest stop coming up," the car said with a uncharacteristically flat tone. "They don't fire around pumps. It'd spoil the game. Pull in. We'll hold up here."

A few clicks later, Gia pulled the car alongside a petrol stand and turned the key. The engine rattled and shook itself to a halt. A puff of steam abruptly burst from the seams where the hood met the fenders.

Gia let her face fall into her hands.

"Gia?" the voice said softly, and Gia looked up to see a stranger sitting in the passenger seat right beside her. The tall woman wore a vivid, glittering red one-piece with a chrome belt and black running shoes, had brown hair that fell in curls, dark olive skin, piercing amber eyes and sharp features that immediately made Gia think of the word, "Hellenic." Gia took a long look at her adopted sister,

"Christine?" Gia said, touched. _A face to go with that contralto, at last!_

The apparition nodded. Her brows were knit together with worry.

"Long ago," the woman said as she took Gia's hand, "so long ago... there was a mortal woman named Tisiphone. She was the daughter of a Greek warlord who doesn't deserve the dignity of the title 'king.' Her heart was broken when he had her betrothed, a noble named Cithǽron, murdered."

Christine faltered. Gia took a secret comfort in seeing the implacable Fury overwrought.

"This one boy, Arnold, younger than you even when you met me... reminded me so much of him. But he wasn't strong enough, and Roland before him wasn't good enough. That's why I insisted on the racing harnesses - sorry, I'm drifting. Where was I...? When Tisiphone defied her father, the king conveniently sacrificed her to the gods..."

The woman's coiled hair opened its many hissing mouths. Tisiphone's horizontally slitted eyes glowed golden and sharp fangs peeked past her lips. "...not realizing death by fire is a terrific way to kickstart a transfiguration. He paid dearly for that mistake."

Gia stubbornly refused to look away from the gorgon unveiled. "Big sister, you're babbling. What are you trying to tell me?"

A clawed hand gently brushed Gia's cheek. "I'm trying to say... I'd rather you not die for a little while longer."

Gia grunted. A hot wind blew the scraggly brush of the desert around them. She let her head lean back upon the headrest.

"I can't protect you from machine guns. 'Cept maybe with my engine block. There're a hundred ways I could lose you out here."

"Christine, how can I stay with you, with the family, without betraying the human family?"

"Well... about time you asked the big question. I guess I really intimidated you, huh?" The woman in the passenger seat looked human again, and her voice matched Gia's quiet, reflective tone.

"Murdering someone's parents'll do that."

"We Furies, think of us as personifications of those impersonal forces that select against people like "Big Dog" back there. Let's say you were breeding animals for domestication. You start out with wild animals. The ones that show tractability and smarts, you breed. The others you release back into the woods. There comes a point where most of the puppies are housebroken, but some are throwbacks - useless stock, and no longer fit to survive on their own. The only humane answer is to cull them."

"That's a dressed-up way of saying, 'you kill people you don't like,'" Gia retorted.

"Humans have rules they must live by. So do Furies. Besides, I'm not completely unreasonable. One of my first drivers got careless and hit a kid. He tried to cover it up."

"Hoo! He had no idea what he was driving," Gia chuckled.

"Nope! But he was 'a good and decent man.' I convinced him to turn himself in and... never saw him again." Christine's voice sounded nostalgic. "And there I go, getting lost in all these memories." She smiled to Gia.

"So we're pets to you?"

"It's a metaphor, hun."

Gia struggled to force away the simpering smile written into her nervous system. "How is what you're doing to humanity any different from what my parents did to me? I didn't measure up to their idea of perfection..." She angrily pointed to her own face, once pretty, now deformed, like a stroke victim. "...so they did this to me."

"Ouch! That's a good argument."

"By what right did they change me?" Gia pressed the point. "Even if you suppose my... 'flaw' is terrible and sinful-"

"You preferring girls?" Christine cut in. "Takes you out of the breeding pool, but it isn't-"

"By what right did they put a scissor up my nose!"

"By no right at all! L'il sister, please calm down."

"You asked for it!"

"I did, and that was brilliant. So good, I need a moment." Christine spoke with uncharacteristic meekness, both to rally her thoughts and to placate her driver. "Whew, cousin Dark never stood a chance!"

Gia chuffed and climbed out of the dilapidated Fury.

The sun was already setting. Gia approached the little hut at the edge of the station. She peeked in, confused. The proprietor's dog sat calmly at her feet, but no one human was anywhere to be found.

"Fill 'er up?" the dog asked helpfully.

Gia started, then she stared down at the bushy sheepdog. "You can talk."

"You're very observant, young miss. Have you never met a talking dog before?"

"Oh! No, but I've heard about them." For once Gia smiled a real smile, disarmed by the animal's politeness.

"There are many here," he volunteered helpfully. "This is where talking dogs come from."

Gia pumped the gas, paid the dog, and returned to Christine, but the seats were empty. The constant music had fallen silent, waiting.

She sat down and closed the creaky door. "Think our friend back there's gone?" Gia asked the empty air as she shrugged back into her harness.

"Doubt it," the voice answered from the AV. The engine started anyhow. With a wave to the sheepdog, they were on their way. Gia selected a new song. The car cooed her approval and sang along, "There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke."

"Christine, the truth," Gia demanded firmly. "What do you want from me?"

"I want your hands on the wheel and your foot on the brakes," the Fury answered. "I want a pact. You give me balance, and I'll give you _power_."

"So I'm Jiminy Cricket. Now we gotta talk about the contraband."

"Uh uh! You're the one who assumed we were smuggling drugs. One'a my former drivers did that and got caught. Never again. I said we were secure couriers, remember? Mostly we carry doner organs in the trunk. Drugs too, but not the illegal kind."

"Organs from your...?"

"Heck no! Girl, you can't just stuff random kidneys into someone!"

"Well with the magic you already do..."

"Wish I could. Be a neat trick."

"Tisiphone? Why 'Christine?'"

"Oh! Heh... Rollie had just come back from Europe. Soon before we met, he'd seen this French film about a man's mistress called _Christine._ Called me that 'cause I was the only one in his life that could tempt him away from his wife. I was so flattered, I kept it. Wouldn't you?"

Gia calmly peered at the oncoming headlights in the desert night. "Let us not speak falsely now, the hour's getting late," they sang together.

"Alright, why me? Why'd you choose me?"

"Because you needed me, because I like you, 'cause it royally pisses Hermes off, and if you didn't have arms to scrub away bird droppings you'd want a driver too."

Gia laughed despite herself. "Be serious."

"You get serious! Back at Zachry you saw as I see. You were safe, you were free to go, but you couldn't turn your back. That is what it means to be driven by the Furies. We both know how you're gonna choose, so get on with it."

"Christine, I don't buy it."

"Buy what?"

"I've let myself be defined by what my parents did to me. You've let yourself be defined by... what was it? Sith-uh-ron?"

"Near enough."

"So the real question is - when do _we_ start defining who we are?" Gia jabbed a button on the AV. "That you, Big Dog?"

"Hey hey, izzat see-cue-bee come to play again?" A tenor voice answered from the speakers. "What are you wearing?"

_How many people has this schmuck killed? _"Shut it, poser!" Gia cut him off. "You trying to sound street? You're no more street than I am, Shylock. You get beat up too much in school, short stuff? Dog get run over? Is that why you're out here with that big ol' chip on your shoulder?"

"Gia...!" Christine whispered, amazed.

"...you dead," Big Dog answered coldly. "Oh, you so dead!"

_Easily manipulated. C'mon, let's play chicken, straight for the engine block._ "Grow up, Napoleon!" Gia kicked on Christine's floodlights.

* * *

**_You were safe, you were free to go, but you couldn't turn your back. _**

**_That is what it means to be driven by the Furies._**

* * *

And what the heck, they won.

Big Dog's blood flowed through the bent metal, painting the bare patches red. With ear-grating groans and pops and hisses, the old Plymouth bulged like a vein into its proper shape.

"This is CQB 241," a sultry contralto purred from all nearby radios. "We just put Big Dog down. Woof woof. Anyone else wanna play? I'm hungry."

- Ignatz01 has signed off.

- 1FFZ354 has signed off.

- Jomomma1337 has signed off.

- Biggusdickus has signed off.

You get the idea.

"...a wildcat did growl," the Fury belted over the airwaves. "Two riders were approaching. The wind began to howl!"

* * *

That's how our blood-red Plymouth Fury cruised through the rest of the badlands unopposed. Now wasn't that a nice story? I'm off to write the death of Eddie Cullen. I promise it'll be messy.

And fuck you too.

.


	9. Chapter 9

"But I'm hungry!" With that, the wheel jerked right out from under Gia's hands, the tires ran off into the hissing, popping gravel shoulder, and finally the engine thunked silent like an angry kid slamming a door.

Gia gripped the wheel hard enough for her knuckles to turn white, fighting to control her temper. "How can a thousand-year-old spook like you," she scolded, "suddenly start acting like a six year old?"

"Gia, that hurts," the voice complained, and Gia eased her stranglehold of the steering wheel. She took a deep breath. They'd cleared the badlands proper and were skirting the borders on their way to their destination. But the convalescing Christine had scared away all the predators, and had complained non-stop about being ravenously hungry, culminating in this temper tantrum.

_Alright, I'm the sane one, remember? Start acting like it. "_Christine," Gia said sweetly to her talking car. Given the surgery she'd been subjected to, "sweetly" was her voice's default mode, but this time she just went with it. "If we're going to work together, you hafta promise me never to yank the wheel away like that when I'm driving. It's not safe."

"...point taken," the car conceded.

"Now, am I right in assuming you're not gonna start up?"

The hood popped open, hiding the moonlit road ahead with a wall of red paint.

"Great. Big sister," Gia fought to hide her impatience. "You're acting like a bratty _little_ sister right now. You know we have a rescue to get to. Clock's ticking."

"And we're likely going into a fight," Christine countered. "So I need to be in fighting trim. Does my engine sound right to you?"

_No,_ Gia admitted to herself, _no it doesn't._

"You know what I need to heal up faster. And I can smell it coming up behind us."

"I see." There was no point in arguing any further, not with Christine throwing fits. "Alright, what's the plan?"

"The truck. Hitch a ride with the truck."

She could hear the rumble-hiss of a truck in the distance, closing fast. "Live bait again?"

"Gia, by now I've earned a little trust, huh?"

* * *

**_Bobo_**

* * *

Gia nodded her acquiescence and hurried out of the car into the night, just in time to wave a hitchhiker's thumb at a passing pickup. It slowed to a halt a few car-lengths ahead of Christine. Gia eyed the tall, narrow steel and brushed aluminum trailer, the kind that carried horses or other livestock. _What am I getting myself into this time?_ She caught a whiff of the animal-stink emanating from it and gagged.

So she rushed forward to the dusty pickup and found the passenger's side door hanging open for her. "Car trouble?" A voice rasped from inside the cab. Gia opened it to see an equally dusty, wrinkled old man in western gear at the wheel.

"Yup," she answered. "Old car. Never know when it's gonna blow a cog. Can you gimme a lift?"

The man's wizened face crinkled into a smile. "Hop in." And Gia did. She could smell the whiskey oozing out of his pores. Old lushes like him too often defied the laws against drinking and driving.

_Huh! Killed someone 'cause of it, maybe?_

The man peered at the inert red Plymouth in his mirror and whistled. "Shame! You fix that car up, girl. She's a beaut'. Don't make 'em like that anymore." He started the engine and they pulled away.

"That is the plan, but getting parts takes time. Looks like I'm stuck for a while. Thanks for the lift."

"Heh! No problem. Can't leave a pretty girl like you alone on the edge'a nowhere. Dangerous world."

_He seems nice enough,_ Gia thought. _But he's a murderer. Christine can smell it from miles away. Watch yourself, Gia._

"Howso?" _Leading question._

"Kidding, right? I lost family to a bad element. Damn hippies!"

"Oh! I'm sorry."

"Not much younger'n you. See?" Here he pulled his sunflap down, revealing the posed, smiling face of a blonde. _Wife?_ Gia thought. _No, hair's too modern._ "Daughter," she concluded aloud.

"Uh huh," the man adjusted his stetson. "Adopted. Never did get married. Anyway, dangerous world. Young lady like you needs to be more careful."

"She was lucky to have you, sir. I'm adopted too, after I lost my folks."

"Aw, you're a sweetie, aren't ya? And 'sir' too? Somebody raised you up right."

"I was just gonna say I'd forgotten my manners. Gia Elliott." She gave him a little wave. Despite herself, she found herself warming to this old country gentleman, drunk on no.

"Blake Ryder, and pleased to meet'cha. She was a good kid too, my Melissa."

Gia noted that he didn't react to the Elliott name, so the man wasn't an occultist or otherwise supernatural. _One more variable out of the equation. Of course, that also means the family name won't protect me._

"What happened?"

"You sure you wanna hear about this? It don't make for nice conversation."

Gia shrugged. "Morbid curiosity. And we've got a long way to the next town." _Just pull threads. Watch the whole rotten tapestry come undone._

"Well, see I made my living as an animal trainer for the movies. Stuntman too. I was off on a safari, something of a business trip, and these damned hippies on their drugs - I figured out they met Melissa through some friends at that pricy private school I sent her to - anyway, this guy name Dude and his pals came in, all coked up. Fed her a Mickey."

Gia didn't have to pretend to look sympathetic.

"Sure I don't hafta tell you what went on after, or what I found when I got back."

"Drugs," Gia commented. "They make people do strange things."

"Hell yeah, pump enough of 'em into a body, you don't got a whole lot left. Hey, you're not hopped up on something, are you?"

"No sir, I am not!" Gia said spiritedly. "I get that all the time 'cause my face's so weird. But that's nerve damage from an operation."

"Didn't go well, huh?

"Not for me, it didn't." Gia had all this planned out by now. She could lie quite ably by omission and misdirection. The operation had worked exactly as designed, but there was no need to tell him that.

"Now you don't look all that bad," the man gallantly offered.

"And you have no room to talk, Mr. Ryder. I can smell your drinking. Not that I blame you for it after that story."

Ryder grunted. "Yeah, I see what you mean. But me, I got a fair excuse. What was theirs?"

"None. Some people are just plain bad." Gia stared out at the waxing moon.

"I'll drink to that, now you bring it up." He produced a silver hip-flask from his back pocket and took a swig, other hand never leaving the wheel. "Y'know, I met a trucker once, rigged up his windshield-washer reservoir with a little tube and filled it up with corn likker. Ain't that something? Cops never did catch on." He pocketed the flask again.

"I can't say I approve, Mr. Ryder. But it is inventive." _Time for the million-dollar question._ "What happened to Dude?"

"Oh, I roughed 'em up some, ended up in jail for assault an' battery. But the judge only gave me two years with good behavior. Dude and his friends got the book thrown at 'em, and that's as much as I know."

"You still an animal trainer?"

"Nope. Got out of that business a while ago. Young man's game."

"So what're you hauling? I figured you had horses or something back there."

"Oh no, that just Bobo."

"Bobo?"

"Gorilla."

"Seriously?"

"Now would I lie to you?" Ryder said with a grin at Gia's surprise. "I used to show Bobo off at carnivals and so on. But all those shows got shut down a while back."

"Aren't they endangered?"

"Yup. Bobo only has me, though. Can't release him, he's too damn old, like me. So I take care of him. I'll show him to you when we get to town, if you like."

Seeing some broken-down, smelly old ape was pretty low on Gia's list, but... _keep pulling._ "I'd like that. Shouldn't you give him to a zoo?"

"Don't think it'd be right by him."

She answered some of his questions about her for a while, nimbly dodging anything that might reveal her disability, her intentions or her slavering pet demon, until finally she asked, "what were you doing in safari?"

"Research. See, the old witch doctors there, they know all kinds of tricks with drugs. Come in handy for some of the meaner animals. Y'know, makes 'em more docile."

"Uh huh... Gia nodded. She saw bright fog lights in the truck's mirror and checked her seatbelt. She felt a little surge of smug satisfaction even as she braced for impact.

"Damn hippies racing around with their brights turned on—!"

_WHAM!_ The trailer imploded, crushed like a soda can from behind. The wheels shimmied and sent shockwaves through the attached pickup, forcing Ryder to hit the brakes.

Ryder cursed up a streak as he yanked up the parking brake, tore off his seatbelt and shoved his door open, Gia padding right behind him. Ryder's charge faltered when he saw beyond the glare the familiar lines of the red Plymouth Fury. "The hell...?" he bellowed back at Gia. Then he rushed to the driver's side door—

...only to recoil with a little squeak as the tinted window rolled down to reveal a decaying mask of flesh and bone. The cabin light flicked on. The uneasy spectres Christine carried sat inside in various states of injury and decay, grinning at him.

Gia put a hand over her mouth, not to stifle a scream but a giggling fit. This was, Gia knew, one of Christine's favorite stunts whenever somebody actually dared to get close enough. "Men hide their fear with anger," the Fury had told her. "When they act their maddest, they're really only a hair away from pissing themselves." Gia had long ago stopped being afraid of the ghoulish apparitions and these days was even on a friendly basis with former drivers Roland and Arnold. Perhaps one day, Gia thought dolefully, she too would live on inside the car.

She took the moment to peek inside the reeking can of the cattle-carrier, only to recoil with a matching squeal of her own. The blood leaking from it she'd expected. The hairy mess in its own waste she'd expected.

She'd not expected the fur to have torn, revealing pale pink skin.

Both Ryder and Gia stood for a moment, shivering in perfectly mirrored horror and confusion, until Gia broke the tableau and snarled. She turned away from the abominable, stinking ruin of crumpled aluminum and glared at Ryder with that one look, all arched eyebrows, gritted teeth and glassy eyes, that revealed her as adopted kin to the Erinyes.

The car's front bumper had torn, and the jagged hood looked like the gaping maw of a shark. It backed away so abruptly the tires shrieked, emitting a cloud of burnt rubber. It pivoted just enough to lock its blazing lights onto Ryder. The behemoth lunged forward.

"Stop," Gia commanded calmly.

The car braked and the engine actually skipped a beat. Vapor-locked in front of Ryder, the mighty V-8 fought to shake off a stall. "You're kidding!" The voice inside shouted.

"...what...?" Ryder ventured.

"Shut up," Gia said calmly over the roar of the engine revving in neutral. She knew Christine was foaming-at-the-chops furious. Gia noticed the rear license plate had torn away from the cattle-car. She picked it up.

"Mr. Ryder, unhitch your trailer. Just _do_ it!" She automatically stomped out any protest.

Confusion, mortal terror and fury of his own warring inside him, the old man mechanically obeyed. As he did so, Gia walked forward to the pickup's cab, and returned with the photograph of Melissa.

She showed it to him, then crumpled it into a pocket. "Christine, off the road with it."

With a growl, Christine obeyed, smashing into the cattle-car from the side. It actually hung aloft for half a second on its way off the road and the embankment into the darkness. Gia waited calmly until the tinny noises and clatters ceased.

"Mr. Ryder," she said solemnly, "you're free. I've set you free of it. No more Melissa, no more Dude. Nothing left. You go do something else with what's left of your life. Go start a new one, or crawl up a bottle and die, or whatever. But you get out of here."

He hesitated, literally struck dumb.

"Go on, git!" Gia commanded, as if shooing away a stray dog. So the man walked to his pickup, climbed in, started his engine and drove away.

Gia and Christine watched until his tail-lights vanished. "Good girl," Gia said to her partner, stroking her fender. _Partner... yeah._

"He's a murderer," Christine husked. Gia watched as the damage repaired itself, metal knitting and dents inflating with groans and pops. Her engine sounded much better.

"He was a nice man who adopted a little girl and raised her well." Gia sat back down in the wonderful oxblood-leather seats and dumped Ryder's crumpled plate and Melissa's photo in back for later disposal. The car's interior was showroom-perfect again. "It'd be incredibly hypocritical for you to destroy him for avenging the murder of his daughter."

"Don't compare what we do to what he did," Christine protested. "I just kill people."

Gia cocked an eyebrow, shifted gears and started them forward again.

"I don't bake people's brains on drugs, hobble them and sew 'em into fancy showbiz gorilla suits."

Two yellowed, bloodshot monkey eyes pleaded miserably from the rear-view mirror. Gia resolved to ignore them. Dude was no longer of any importance. "Settle down, partner. You got your snack, and we're in a hurry." She flicked on the AV and started looking for some nice song to calm Tisiphone down.

"You were once a warm companion..." tremoloed from the speakers. Gia smiled.

"You and your show tunes," Christine groused, though Gia knew better.

"You were once a friend and father," Gia sang along. "Then the world was shattered."

"I'm nothing like him!" the voice nagged over the music as they drove off together into the country-dark night. "And I don't mind telling you my 'snack' tasted fuuuhn-key!"

* * *

**_For Aubigne Spratling._**

* * *

.


	10. Chapter 10

_I'm gonna die, _Kino realized._ Not "someday." Today._

* * *

_**- The Descent of Inanna**_

* * *

The door locked behind her.

Kino looked around the concrete cell, painted an unpleasant shade of drab green. A bare steel toilet. A sink with push-button faucets. A slab with a mattress. Barred window. Heavy steel door. _How do I get out of this. I don't see how-!_

_No, get hold of yourself, Kino. This is not how it ends. Control, like Master taught you. One... two... three... lemmeoutlemmeout - stop that!_

She turned to the door. Bars at the tiny window, just over her head. Fiberglass beyond that. _Can they hear me?_ It was absurd but she tried the door anyway. Didn't budge. The bars were solid too.

"Please, this is all a mistake," she called out. "Please let me out. I didn't do anything wrong. If I did I'm sorry. I'm a silly foreigner who doesn't know any better!"

_Your voice is breaking, Kino. You're scared._

_Damn right, I am!_

"I come from a very rich family. They'll pay money." _A lie. Who cares!_ "Please?"

_This is undignified._

_The brave don't keep their courage in a holster._

_I don't want dignity, I want out!_

_The most important thing is not to lose your life._

_I have, haven't I?_

Kino sank to a crouch on the floor. Just this morning, the world had seemed so large, and she'd had a whole lifetime to explore it. The town, she'd been told, was rich and warlike, with an exciting, vibrant nightlife. Money hadn't been a problem for a while. She'd lived a lean life for months and had also found several profitable odd-jobs. Overdue to spend and enjoy.

She'd stopped in an inn to freshen up, and then a trio of the local law-enforcement were all over her, asking questions and demanding she come with them.

_I should have drawn on them._

_They already had a gun trained on you and you hadn't done anything wrong._

_Still should have drawn on them! Better to die fighting._

She'd gambled, protesting that she was a law-abiding person and allowed them to take her gunbelt from her.

_Never, ever make that mistake again! If there is any "again."_

_Why are you going over this? You need to find a way out._

_Because there is no way out._

They marched her into court almost immediately. The judge spoke very kindly, called her "miss Kino" in a respectful voice, asked her a few simple questions, and declared her guilty.

"What? Sir, guilty of what? What am I accused of?" she'd howled as more muscle-men dragged her out of the courtroom.

_This is all happening too fast. The judge said I was to be executed after the sun set. _Kino looked up at the window. The sky was already turning orange. _Why? Why, why, why?_

She got up and walked, hobbled though she was by anklet-chains, over to the window. But the angle was wrong, she couldn't see the sunset. Naturally she tried the bars. Solid as stone.

_My last chance to see the sun, and they deny me even that._

_Kino, stop it! You're going to get out of here. This is all a mistake. You'll see the sun rise tomorrow morning._

_Will I? How?_

_..._

"Thought so," Kino whispered. She sank down onto the mattress. _I'm losing my mind, I'm talking to myself. Hermes, I need you!_

_So this is what it's like to die. Even when things were at their worst, you were always looking for a way out. There was always a tomorrow, and a chance._

_No... this is what it's like to be murdered. You're about to be murdered over some trumped-up charge by a kangaroo court. This is what you get for being careless. You've got to scope out the places you visit more carefully - remember the coliseum?_

_But that would spoil the surprise._

_...You're an idiot._

Kino prowled every inch of the stone floor, her eyes raked the walls, gazed up at the ceiling. A few cracks. If she had a knife and a month, she might be able to work her way out. If her hands weren't cuffed. If her legs weren't chained. If she'd never come to this horrid city in the first place. _If, if, if!_

_I have an hour, maybe less. It's such a senseless, useless way to die. How do they execute people here? _She sat back down on the mattress. _I am not going to give them the satisfaction of seeing me break down. I'm not! I will not beg. I can manage that at least._

Kino felt a flare of pure rage when she noticed that, while she was in the courtroom, someone had sewn some sort of badge onto her khaki coat: a black triangle. She dug into her jacket pocket for a knife, but the guards had searched her thoroughly and confiscated every last one of her weapons. She still had most of her things, though.

...including one last pathetic shred of hope. She found it secreted safely inside her breast pocket.

"Kana," she gazed down at the pale gray feather in her hand. "...help me."

Kino waited. Silence.

_Kino, you're being silly,_ the pragmatic voice nagged at her.

_But... couldn't there be some magic left in this? It's my proof, after all. I wasn't hallucinating!_

_Maybe you'll see Guri again soon, huh?_

Kino put the feather back into its pocket and sagged. Her last ember of hope went cold.

A wave of weariiness crashed over her. She sank.

_You have a last hour, girl. You'd better make the most of it._

_But I'm tired, and there's no point. I want to remember._

So Kino...

...fell into a field of red flowers, laughing at Hermes' jokes.

...clung to the riggings of a ship's mast, the wind's plaything.

...found Hermes at last and hugged his handlebars.

...had rough and hungry sex in back of a bouncing truck.

...danced and laughed in the desert while a life-saving downpour washed the heat, dust and sweat from her.

...watched a whole lunatic town dance wearing cat-ears and tails.

...chased a rattletrap flying-machine.

...shared tea and supper and stories with a trio of bona fide angels.

_Oh, what a life! Even if it's all over, I am so grateful..._

The vault-like door opened. Sakura peeked in, the fading sunlight setting her red curls afire. "Are you in trouble, Kino?"

"Oh thank heaven!" Kino gasped. "I was locked in."

"You better hurry, the show's about to start." The girl bounced up and down and her little school scarf rustled in the air. "C'mon!"

Sakura led her through the dim and battered labyrinth of their high school toward the auditorium. "I never can find my way around in here," Kino confided, pausing long enough to tie the laces of her own buster-browns. They could hear the noise of a crowd. A door burst open and Nimya yanked Kino inside.

Sakura gave Kino a final thumbs-up. "Break a leg!"

Nimya hustled Kino backstage, where she was confronted by a strange, archaic costume of white and silver.

"Hurry up and change," Nimya commanded. "You're late! I'll go get things started. Please tell me you remember your lines?"

"Lines?" Kino squeaked, but the blonde had already charged out the door. Kino ducked out of her sailor-suit and skirt and yanked on the costume. She peeked outside, and saw Nimya lit by a spotlight on the stage.

"And without further delay," she announced, "The Descent of Inanna!" The lights dimmed. Soft music began playing... a tune that Kino thought she remembered from long ago, and Nimya darted back to her and shoved her onstage, toward an iron gate.

Behind the gate stood a peculiar person wearing ornate robes, a hood and a familiar, intimidating cyclopean mask. He said in a low, resonant voice, "from the great heaven the goddess set her mind to the world below. From the great heaven Inanna set her mind to the world below. From the great heaven she came to the gates of the world below."

The masked Speaker turned toward her. "Wait here, Inanna. I will speak to my mistress. Stay here, Inanna. Neti, doorman of the underworld shall speak to his mistress. The doorman of the underworld shall tell Erishkigal you have come." The familiar figure then crossed the stage, and the spotlight followed him to illuminate a woman with obsidian-black skin, flowing opal hair, and clad only in gold necklace, bracers and belt. Erishkigal reclined upon a wide throne.

"My mistress, a lone woman has arrived at the palace. My mistress, your sister has arrived at the palace. My mistress, your sister has abandoned the sun and arrived at your palace."

The strange inky figure rose from her couch. "Come Neti, chief doorman of the underworld, and do not neglect the instructions I will give you. Let the seven gates of the underworld be bolted. Let the seven gates admit my humbled sister."

The Speaker returned and opened the gate for Kino. "Come, enter. Come, Inanna, and enter. Enter freely and of your own will." Then he took away the turban from Kino's head.

Kino blinked. She looked out at the faces in the crowd. _So many..._ there was Master, and beside her old granny, there Dame Corina with Sakura's parents sitting behind. Shizu passed popcorn to Johnny Noble and the little girl they called "wise one." And there beside Kana, a crow playfully nibbling her ear, sat a pale, long-faced stranger all in black, his long, knobby fingers steepled, with shaggy raven hair and eyes dark as midnight, yet sparkling with stardust.

Kino recalled the moment she'd beheld an eerie woman in a humble cart who'd turned out to be a fertility goddess. _Who is that?_

"Psst!" the Speaker whispered to her, "your line. 'What is this?'"

"What is this?" Kino blurted.

"The rites of the underworld are perfect. Question not the rites of the underworld."

Then he took away her bead necklace.

"What is this?"

"The rites of the underworld are perfect. Question not the rites of the underworld."

And so on, until finally Kino wore only a beltless white linen gown, which now seemed more a shroud. This too he took from her, and Kino stood bared, blushing and cringing on the stage.

"Wuh- what is this?"

"The rites of the underworld are perfect. Question not the rites of the underworld."

He brought her before the dark one's throne, and made her to kneel before Erishkigal.

And Erishkigal rose and glared down at her, and she said, "when she looked, it was the look of death. When she shouted, it was the speech of anger and heavy guilt. And when she struck, it was the end of life."

All Kino's strength failed her. She fainted and fell onto her back beneath the shadow of Erishkigal. Then the gatekeeper lifted her and wrapped chains around her until she dangled, limp and helpless, over the stage.

The masked man proclaimed, "And the corpse was hanged from a hook. But this is not the end of the story."

* * *

_**I am what I am and can't be anything else.**_

_**It's the world that changed.**_

* * *

—_What—_

A key rattled in the door. Kino jolted upright, onto her feet as if shocked. _Dozed off! I dreamed... something...? Oh for pity's... this is no time for another stupid high school dream!_

A quintet of guards grabbed her arms and yanked her out of the cell into a dim corridor.

The long walk.

_But it isn't a long walk, the corridor's too short. It's supposed to be a long walk, but it's more like walking through an airport, except for the chains rattling. You're leaving now. Nothing left but to leave. Let's get it over with._

_This is torture! This isn't right. I haven't done anything!_

"It's not right," she tried one last time with her guards. "I don't even know why you're doing this."

"Shut up," one of the guards said. He was trying to sound tough, but Kino heard something in his voice.

"You don't like it any more than I do. Why do it?"

"I said be quiet." The man opened a double-door.

They walked into a grassy courtyard. There was an open gate on the far side. _Out that gateway lies the whole world! I'd give anything to just be over there._ It was night now, and she didn't see it at first: in the middle of the courtyard waited a gallows.

_A noose. Hanging. — No!_

"P-please... I brought guns. Shoot me. Please! I won't die like this."

No answer. They were ignoring even her last pathetic plea. Then some strangely distanced and dispassionate part of herself observed as everything else in her jumped and bucked and fought like a terrified animal. For an instant she had one arm free, but it was hooked again before she could do anything.

_Kino, this is useless. Show some dign—shut up you!_ They grabbed her under her armpits and carried her like a sack, her legs flailing and trying to get even one good kick in, chain rattling madly.

"Let me go! _Uuuaaghhh!"_

_Oh, this is too much! Couldn't I at least go into shock or something?_

A hand yanked at her collar and a button vanished into the moonlight. The air felt cold against her neck and bared shoulders.

"I don't want to die!"

They reached the wooden stairs and she kicked against them. Even in the darkness, every detail of the wood burned into her eyes. Her blood roared in her ears. _Damned if I'll just walk up these stairs for - that's way too bright for moonlight._

She looked over her shoulder — blinding light!

—_What—_

* * *

"C'mon, get in!" A girl's voice. Kino felt grass. She was lying on wet grass. She fell?

She opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was the ruin of the gallows, lying half-off its mountings, planks all askew. She rolled over.

A tire. And meat. Fresh red meat wrapped around it. Looked like an intact intestine. She'd once tried a meal called "chitterlings." _Kino, get up you idiot!_

"...flossing," a woman's voice over the rough flanging of electric guitars. A hand. A car door, open.

_Gia!_

Gia popped the hasp of her elaborate seat-belt and towed Kino with all her might into the car. The—

_Car!_ Kino's mind gibbered to itself. _Car! Car! Car! Car!_

Horror piled upon horrors! She'd just been rescued from the last dance by a thing that haunted her nightmares. But... was it not always better to live? Kino found herself face-down on warm, giving leather, her legs lying over Gia's.

Acceleration shut the door for them. "Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?" a woman's voice sang out. "Revolution calling!"

"Kino, move over already. You're spoiling our rescue." Kino squirmed away and obediently righted herself, just in time to see the last survivor of her former guards running away from them toward the courtyard gate.

"Oh, you think you're getting away, don'cha shitter? Nooo you don't!" Gia mocked.

Just as the man's hand was reaching for a door handle, he went under the car. Kino winced at the awful, unforgettable sound of bones snapping beneath them. There was a bump upward, and Gia whooped and laughed her triumph. "Let's motorvate!" The demon-on-wheels spun around the dim grassy courtyard in a bootlegger turn and, in a flash and a guitar riff, the gateway vanished and they were free!

Kino felt for a chilling moment as if a boa constrictor was wrapping around her, and watched as a racing harness hugged her of its own accord and pulled her tight against the seat. She yelped.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," a voice said, not Gia's, and for the moment sounding like it was talking with its mouth full.

"Christine, take it for a moment will'ya?" Gia asked the air. Then she abandoned the wheel to produce a thin set of metal tools hidden up her left sleeve. With practiced ease she opened the handcuffs and leg-chains. "You okay?"

Kino managed a nod. _The car drives itself!_

"Toss those out the window, unless they're your idea of a fun evening." Kino meekly did as she was told while Gia refastened her own driving harness, then returned to steering. "I got it," she told the car. "By the way, the prog-metal sent that completely over the top!"

Car and driver laughed. Automatic wipers lobbed blood out of the way. Kino watched, mesmerized, as bullet-holes in the windshield shrank and vanished.

They were ripping through the night. Kino heard wind whistling even through the thick glass, the snarling motor and the vintage heavy metal music. She could just barely see the surrounding hills in the country darkness. They were going two hundred klicks an hour, maybe more, and while she could see Gia was skilled, the way this heavy car held the road confirmed something Kino had suspected: it could cheat the laws of inertia when it chose. Kino's heels involuntarily ground into the floorboards. The aftermarket stick shift with attached nitrous button and the neat bulge in the front hood all took on frightful significance.

"Hey, don't be scared," Gia said gently, her eyes still glued to the road. She was having terrific fun.

"Gia..." Kino began, her brain still trying to catch up with everything that had happened. "How did you find me?"

"That's my doing, hun," a silky, familiar voice answered from the GPS console. _The Fury!_ Kino had not heard that voice since her one encounter by a foggy morning's dreamlike light. "Gia had an unpleasant recurring dream about you getting strung up, so we started keeping track of you."

"It was really scary!" Gia added. "We were in this dark cave, and I was mad at you and then you were hanged. Anyway, figured once you headed this way you'd run into trouble."

A few hazy images and half-memories flitted through Kino's head, but they vanished like smoke even as she tried to grasp them. "Trouble. Yeah, one way to put it. I'm... very grateful. Gimme a moment, okay? I was looking death in the face two minutes ago."

Gia grunted. "Been there. Crack open a beer."

"You drink while you're driving?"

"Me? Nope, but you need to relax. What're they gonna do, hang us twice?"

_The last thing I need right now is to deaden my reflexes. What I need to do is get my strength back and figure out how to get out of this mess, before "Christine" there decides to turn Hermes' driver into mulch._

"Water?" Kino begged. Gia produced a canteen and Kino sucked the warm, stale-tasting water down, suddenly greedy as desert sand. The world spun and went dim.

_Oh, now I go into shock? Terrific!_

"Breaking the silence of the night, through the streets I'm screaming," the dashboard-mounted screen belted, until Gia tapped it silent. "That's entirely enough headbanging, partner. Kino's trying to rest."

"That was so cruel," Kino whispered as she sank. "I didn't do anything wrong."

"We know." The Fury's voice, soothing and kind. "How about I promise not to do anything horrid to you for at least an hour, hmm?"

"Don't worry, Kino. When she makes a promise, she means it," Gia added. She eased her foot off the throttle and they slowed to a more reasonable pace.

Kino shivered and rubbed her face. She was drenched all over. _Sweat or tears?_ The empty canteen slipped from her clammy fingers. She listened to the deep growl of the engine muffled by thick floorboards. The Fury's interior was showroom perfect, neatly organized and free of clutter, the leather soft and comfortable. Exactly as she remembered.

Gia picked up the dropped canteen. "Don't wanna be messin' up Christine like that."

Kino closed her bulging, ping-pong-ball eyes and, despite everything, some romantic part of her returned to a sunlit truckers' rest-stop, glittering after a rain, where she had met Georgiana. Hermes had called it chemistry, she'd called it infatuation. By whatever name, Gia had kindled a fire under Kino that only one thing could quench.

But within that very day, Gia's pious parents had taken their girl, unsuspecting, to Kino's hometown for the dreaded operation, and robbed Gia of her free will. Kino was left shattered, lost in grief and self-recrimination, drowning in feelings for which she had no name and which, perhaps, ought never be named.

Then the most sickening shock of all: the dreadful Tisiphone, Hermes' nemesis from across an unimaginable gulf of years, claimed Gia as her thrall.

_And out of nowhere, they come to rescue me? How on Earth...?_

* * *

The houselights came up, and Kana watched as each of the dreamers stirred and vanished from the intimate little theater, until only she, the dark stranger at her left with his black-feathered companion, and the man who had played "Neti" remained. The pair stood from their chairs, and Kana rushed to help the old man step down from the stage.

"You have done well, little wonder, and kindly." the masked Speaker said, and Kana now found the resonant voice warm and familiar rather than intimidating.

"Little?" the oversized crow creeched from the tall person's bony shoulder. "With wings like that?"

"Matthew, it is rude to discuss a woman's imperfections," the dark one chided his familiar gently.

"I'll grow into 'em." Kana smiled and shrugged, sending a rustle through her massive cloud-colored wings. Then without warning she wrapped her arms about the Washi in an embrace. The Speaker for the Haibane Renmei seemed discomfited at first, but then deigned to place an arm around Kana's shoulders, little bells jingling from his robes. "It is comforting to see you again," he confessed, "even if but in a dream."

"Kino will be alright?" Kana asked urgently, looking from the Washi to the dark stranger.

"The myth of Inanna is ancient and potent," the gaunt one answered, his voice airy and mystic compared to the Keeper's. "The mortal's friend shared in this dream. If their friendship be true she will come, and a marquess of Hel shall follow."

"The woman's return from the underworld, in some form, is now all but guaranteed," the masked Washi agreed. "The story demands the scion of the sun reconcile with her dark sister, child of the moon. Lord Shaper?" the Speaker ventured, daring to approach the dark one. "Are the mortals the only creatures of Hyperion and of Hades who must come to terms this day?"

An eyebrow rose over a star-speckled void. "Perhaps, aviarist..." the Shaper returned the Speaker's bow. "...This is a tale of restored harmony. Perhaps certain feuds have outworn their time." Then he smiled down to Kana. "You understand little bird, by calling for my aid in your distress, you have placed yourself in my debt? It is one of the rules - there is always a price."

Kana nodded gravely.

"Then come." With a final nod to the keeper of the ashen wings, he turned to a theater door.

"Yes, Lord Morpheus." Kana gave her old master a final, deep bow, then rushed to open the door for her new one, revealing an opal throne in a lavish court of lapis lazuli and mother of pearl.

"Not Morpheus," the king of dreams corrected. "Not any longer."

"Oh, don't be so formal, you guys!" Matthew the raven squawked. "Call him Daniel, or the Sandman. Everybody does."

* * *

_**So the real question is...**_

_**- when do we start defining who we are?**_

* * *

"Hermes! I don't know what became of him!" Kino jerked upright in the car.

"Gyaah! Don't startle your driver like that!" Gia complained."Don't worry, we got him. Bought him out of the impound lot this afternoon." Gia grinned, and Kino felt a sick lurch in her stomach because Gia's smile was so very wrong in a so-very-familiar way. _Once upon a time I thought that was normal?_

"Have a nice nap? You were out for a good hour."

Kino let her lethargy smother her reaction to Gia's imbecilic grimace. _My fault. _"I can't pay you back. They confiscated all my money."

"Which is what that was all about," the car chimed in. "They ever tell you what you were accused of?"

"Never did."

"Few months ago, new government came into power on a religious platform. Found themselves a handsome source of income criminalizing anybody who doesn't conform to their views," the car explained.

"Huh?" Kino struggled out of her personal tarpit and tried to follow what the car was talking about.

"That's Christine's polite way of saying you stood out like a transvestite," Gia offered.

"Oh... damn!" Kino smacked her forehead. "The sheriffs arrested me right after I came out of the bathroom... the ladies' room!" _Another mistake I won't repeat!_

"And then brought you into court in your usual cross-dressing clothes," Gia said. "I was there in back, watching. You never had a chance."

"How could I be so stupid?"_ Wish I could split myself in two so I could slap myself! That's why the trial was so quick. Dumb dumb dumb! Just because people wear nice clothes instead of bear hides doesn't mean they're civilized!_

_...Well, I guess I shouldn't complain: Hermes is okay and I'm alive, so far. How long have these two been spying on me?_

"Don't worry about the money," Gia gloated. "It wasn't real. We know some excellent forgers."

The car said, "they don't do public executions, so the word's not out yet on the usual grapevines. This time, you make sure to tell the story and warn people away. You listening, Kino?"

"What is that...?" To their right, a town was being consumed by a roaring inferno.

"Bit 'a history," Gia answered. "Fury-vision, I call it."

"There was a close election about a decade ago," the voice from the AV explained. "Incumbents decided they could win by setting fire to a town that favored the opposition. Same incumbents that just got themselves overthrown."

"Traveling in Christine's like traveling through time," Gia added.

Kino quaffed the last of her beer. _Liquid courage._

"Up ahead and to the left," the car continued with the breezy tone of a tour-guide, "you'll see the indigenous massacre a century ago. I'm too late to ever avenge them. There's only so much we can do. And now with this new government... Gia, we're gonna be cruising this place for a long time."

"Hope not. We gotta take down the bad'uns fast! Longer we stay, the more they'll try to hit back, and rescuing Kino was real loud."

"Don't get used to rescues, Kino. Gia, we have a job to do. We can't afford to get sidetracked like this."

_They're plotting murder right in front of me. _

"Hey big sis, don't be such a downer! We avenged a murder before it happened, for once. Crank up something fun."

Kino stared at Gia. The sweet trucker girl she'd been so enamored of didn't correspond at all with this sardonic, refined goth who could pick locks in seconds and spoke so blithely about counterfeiting.

_She ran over five men, and now she's singing. Pretty well, too! But I can't get that horrible crunching sound out of my head. __I've got to get the hell out of here!_

"Highly deadly black taran'chla! C'mon, Kino!"

_It's just like Hermes told me. The Furies seduce and corrupt their drivers, and now my guileless Georgiana's a murderous criminal. _The rapid-fire popping of ribs beneath the car's tire echoed in her mind._ I've killed before, but never someone who was running away, and I've never killed and laughed. _

"Hey mister tally-man, tally me banana..." Kino husked obediently.

"Sometimes," Christine mused aloud as the song faded, "I think evil's a cultural thing. The kids drink it in with their mothers' milk. If we can score the worst of these shitters, we can shorten bad times like these. Like a wolf culling the sick from a herd."

"Culling..."

Gia didn't take her eyes off the road. "I guess you must disapprove of us, huh?"

_Careful, Kino!_ "Uhm... I suppose I'm starting to understand your perspective."

"Christine's not the only Big Bad Wolf out there, Kino. My mom used to tell me a monster would eat up naughty children. Ho, if she only knew!"

Kino took the plunge. "Christine, I thought you and Hermes were feuding."

"Oh, we are!" Christine said smugly.

"He hasn't done anything wrong. And I expiated your complaint with me. Not that I'm complaining, but why did you rescue me?"

"First, you dying that way would not have been just. Second, I enjoyed the nice supper and the look on your face. Third... Hermes was part of a conspiracy to deprive the Furies of our proper role in things. I mean to finish that feud tonight."

"Oooh, scary!" Gia mocked. "And I notice you waited right until Kino was looking through that noose before making your move. You are such a bitch."

"You know it."

_They're insane!_ Kino felt the urge to grab the door handle, but instead let her head sink into the leather seat, much too drained now to rage against impossibilities. _Even if the door would open, I couldn't jump out at this speed._

As if reading her thoughts, the car slowed, and turned off the road into trees.

"What's Gia's part in all this, Christine?"

"I'm holding the leash," Gia answered warmly. "Besides, everybody needs a confidant, a family—"

"I'm surprised Hermes never taught you this," Christine cut in. Kino noted that Gia's carseat nudged forward just a little. "With a few exceptions, we all choose a human to consort with. In an older time people would call it a high priest or priestess. Gia's job is especially important. Those like me, we need somebody to say, 'this one, not this one. Throw the little one back. Mercy on that one.'"

"Wait, 'we?' You mean... entities like you and Hermes." Kino remembered the strange pair Hermes had summoned to help them. _What was it Horo said...? We'd all do anything to protect our mortal consorts? _"Well, that puts my relationship with him in a new light."

"He's a teacher. What's a teacher without a student?" the car said.

"I see. But - and no offense, Gia! - is she fit to do that?"

"S'okay Kino, I know I'm impaired."

"She's fit," the car answered. "Gia suffers. She won't be too lenient."

Kino shivered.

"And there he is." Gia announced. The car's headlights found a motorcycle and a small campground.

Gia put them in park and exited with a pistol drawn. Soon satisfied they were alone, she waved to the car. "We're good. We're well clear of the border now."

Christine shut down on her own. Kino tried the door and found it opened. She got out into the cool dry air of a desert at night, and was mildly surprised that her legs weren't wobbly. She promptly dashed over to Hermes.

"Kino! You made it," the familiar, child-like voice of the motorcycle immediately made Kino feel better.

"Yup. You alright?"

"Fine. I was worried, though. You never came out of the restaurant, and then some policemen loaded me onto a big truck."

Kino was thrilled to find her confiscated gun-belt stowed under Hermes' saddle. She buckled it on and immediately felt safer. _Am I ever gonna feel safe taking it off again?_

"'Well, now I can stop talking to myself. I'll tell you all about what happened later. I need a... a moment."

"Oh! Sure."

Kino started to walk away.

A concerned look crossed Gia's face. She hopped up and retrieved a blanket from the backseat, then wrapped it around Kino's shoulders. "I'll just get a campfire going," she said. "Get some dinner ready. Hope you don't mind hot dogs?"

* * *

_**You have feelings, you just pretend you don't.**_

_**Only crazy people don't have feelings and pretend they do.**_

* * *

"She's been gone a while," the talking motorcycle sighed. The campfire glittered from the chrome of Brough Superior and Plymouth Fury alike.

"She doesn't want to be seen, Hermes. Leave her be. I remember after the operation I desperately wanted to cry. Funny, I still can't, 'cept when I'm happy, but that's not the same thing."

The hiss-crunch of dry grass under boots announced Kino's return to the camp. She sat down in the ring of light, blanket wrapped around her. She'd straightened her clothes and her hair, but the puffiness around her eyes gave her away.

"Better...?" Gia began.

"I've never been so humiliated in my entire life," Kino answered, her voice gravelly and hoarse. "I panicked. I thought I was tough, thought I could face dying. Tisiphone? Thank you for running over those men. Saves me the trouble of gunning 'em down."

"Kino...!" Hermes didn't try to hide his disapproval.

"Can I have some hot dogs?"

Gia handed them over. "Don't be embarrassed. You have no idea how often I've been scared outta my mind! Something similar happened to me in a place called Zachry, I peed my pants."

Kino saw that the car still had gore all over its grille and bumper, like an animal with blood on its muzzle. Nevertheless she found herself gobbling her dinner. "Death really gives you an appetite. Spend all that time around campfires and I don't even like hot dogs. Go figure. And Christine's put me off shiokara for life."

"No accounting for taste," the car retorted. "I love my steady diet of assholes."

Knowing how much gentle Hermes abhorred murder, mayhem and crude language alike, Kino could just hear him grinding his gears as he said, "Tisiphone? This is awkward, but I am in your debt now. So, one last time... won't you please call off this absurd feud?"

"You can't be serious! Did I neglect to mention... you of course remember that little town with the hospital, Gia?" And by now, everyone could hear her savoring the moment before the knife descended.

_Oh... this is gonna suck!_

"Did you know...? That's Kino's home."

Gia turned to stare at her friend, startled. Even Kino couldn't hide the revealing flash of shame crossing her face.

"Uh... yeah. That's right," Kino nodded, regaining her stoicism and secretly angry with herself for being caught off-guard like that. _These days it feels like the more I try to hide, the more everything just comes tumbling out, and everybody, Hermes and Gia and even that damned car, can read every little nuance on my face. _"Hermes and I put a stop to it." She squared her shoulders.

"You mean my sisters and I coerced you into stopping it, after what it did to Gia," Christine corrected. "Don't you?"

"Uh huh," Kino deflated. Her heart sank as Gia's eyes narrowed.

Gia quietly reassessed Kino in light of this revelation. "So... then how was it we met just before, then?"

"Sheer chance! I honestly didn't know where that town was anymore. It's not my home! Hasn't been since I ran away from my family." But the more Kino struggled to make the tale convincing, the more lame her excuses sounded. "I want no part of the place. If I'd known I would have... if I'd known what your parents had planned..." Kino trailed off.

"What?" Gia demanded.

"Tell the truth, traveler!" Christine warned.

Kino hesitated. Finally she couldn't stand it anymore. She hid her face in her hands.

"Nothing... I would have done nothing," she admitted feebly.

Gia hissed.

"You would have made an exception for her," Hermes argued.

"You wouldn't have warned me?" Gia's lips peeled back from clenched teeth.

"I hate you, Christine," Kino added, provoking a malignant chuckle.

"She would have!" Hermes said. "Gia, you matter to her."

"I don't..." Kino cut in, "have the right to intervene in such things. I'm just a traveler. Who am I to judge? I only acted because the Furies forced my hand."

Gia sat silently, assessing, watching Kino fidget, until finally she said, "that... is the most pathetic... self-deceiving... elaborate excuse for cowardice I've ever heard!" Her growl rose and crescendoed to a bellow.

Kino winced, and squirmed like a speared fish.

"Gia!" Hermes rose to his partner's defense, "don't call my rider a coward. It's rare to find someone as capable as Kino who's not a terrible person. Unlike Tisiphone there, she's humble enough not to pass judgment over everybody. Besides, I've never seen her so badly hurt as when she learned what happened to you, ever. She felt very guilty."

"And that is why I took action!" Christine rumbled. "We are the Furies, the servants of justice."

"Servants of vengeance!" Hermes countered angrily. "Do not speak for shame of justice, harridan."

"Shame? Usurper, it is you who lack—"

"Enough!" Gia shouted the bickering down.

Her stoicism held, barely, but anyone who knew Kino could see her suffering under Gia's withering, infernal glare. _Is this gonna get ugly?_

"What do you want me to say, Gia? Would you have me go around trying to change the people and places I visit? Who am I to try to reshape the world in my image? I'm only passing through, I don't have to live with the consequences. The best I can do is to show others the value of non-attachment and self control."

"Your philosophy knows nothing of justice, Kino." Christine accused. "You travel the world and ignore the evils all around you. You think you can end human suffering by teaching others to pretend it all away like you do? There is no room in your pretty little world for evil, for real evil!" Abruptly, the car's headlamps flared, boring into the trio like a dragon's eyes.

"I am pure evil! I am _Christine!"_ Then the Fury commanded with the voice of a demon, "Gia, do as I've taught you to do - destroy her!"

—_Snap!—_ Faster than the eye could follow, Kino's pistol was trained on Gia.

"Stop it!" Hermes shouted. "Tisiphone, don't you dare. I will not forgive this!"

Then all three waited for Gia, who spent the moment staring down the barrel of Kino's revolver. Kino stared back at the weird, uncanny smile on Gia's face, and knew that even the operation couldn't bring a once-charming and innocent girl to smile like that!

Gia raised her empty hands and strolled a few steps to her left. A gentle wind blew her hair.

"Wow, you are fast!" she said. "But do you know, Kino, no matter how good you are with that pistol, I'm the one who would win here? I'm wearing a bullet proof vest. I'm armed... to the teeth. And oh, I'm so underhanded and sneaky these days! I've faced much worse than you and lived." Gia glanced at Christine. "When someone believes in you, you can do anything."

Some instinct warned Kino that Gia was stalling. "You know, I actually think—" and that's when the invisible chemical billowing from Gia's mouth bit her eyes. Kino involuntarily gasped in surprise, pulling more of the awful stuff into her throat and forcing a coughing fit.

_CRACK!_ Something hit Kino and sent her sprawling. She was dimly aware that her finger had convulsed upon the trigger. But Gia was unharmed; she had a hand wrapped around Kino's wrist.

Gia spat out the capsule, waved the gas off, put her Taser away and stepped over the writhing Kino to approach Christine.

"Even if I'd lost, you'd get to kill her in revenge. I have _had_ it with you!" Gia stood defiantly between Christine's burning hot dual headlights and pounded the rumbling front hood. "Just when I thought we finally understood each other you're pulling this crap again — fuck off! Leave Kino alone!"

And for a moment, the only sound was the great engine idling, and the tranquil crackling of the campfire.

"I...don't... believe it!" Hermes finally said in a shocked voice.

Christine answered with a genuine, authentic, right-out-of-the-movies evil laugh. "_Mwah-hahaahaaawwh!_ You are bested, thrice-great Hermes!"

"What?" Gia turned to snarl back at Hermes. "Am I missing something here?"

"How did you do that?" Hermes asked in wonder. "She just... how did you—"

"...heal her?" The Fury offered. Her headlights dimmed and faded; her engine cut off.

Gia's expression changed too, as she realized what she'd just done. "Do it again."

"Kill Kino."

"Go hump a parking meter," Gia answered quietly, astonished. She still felt the odd, disembodied sensation, like wax paper over her mind, but now she could force it away.

"Gia...!" Kino climbed to her knees, coughing. She forced her eyes open to look at Gia's face. Then she waved her hand, fanning the stinging residue off herself as she'd been taught.

"You alright?" Hermes asked.

"Tear gas, I've felt it before." Kino accepted the little packet of tissues Gia offered. "No harm done, 'cept to my pride, again. That was a dirty trick."

"You were pointing a pistol at me."

"I wouldn't willingly shoot you."

"Same," Gia produced her little snub nose with a sleight-of-hand trick, and made it vanish just as ably.

"Hmph! Fair enough." Kino shrugged and holstered her gun. Then she considered Gia from several angles. "Her face is still wrong but, Christine... bravo!" Kino up and applauded, and her voice hitched a little at the last. It might have been the gas. Or not.

"I repeat," Hermes said, "how did you do that?"

The Fury didn't even try to hide her smugness. "You forgot the Erinyes are also revered as healers? I treated her like any victim of brain damage, put her in situations that forced her to fight through her impairment to survive. Eventually her head had to rewire itself. Or she'd die of course, which was fine since I had no use for her as she was."

"That's what it was all about?" Gia raged.

Kino spat out phlegm. "Heartless."

"Machiavellian," Hermes added. "You did that without her consent?"

"Hoo! Girl, when we first met I asked you if you wanted to die. You remember your answer?"

"Uhm..." Gia thought, then her eyes widened. "You decide!"

"Yeah, not much of a life worth risking there," Christine concluded. "And that does constitute consent."

"Huh! That it does," Hermes said. "You followed the rules, and you did accomplish something beyond me. I'm simply not that ruthless."

"But why?" Kino asked.

"Isn't it obvious? To show me up," Hermes answered petulantly. "And how impressed should I be? You took a law-abiding puppet and turned her into a free-thinking criminal."

"And your Kino isn't a criminal?" Christine growled. "I doubt she's a big fan of your cherished trials and law right now."

"There's a big difference between a drumhead and the courts of a decent society."

"Impudent child, you lead your disciples into a candy-coated fantasy. For too long have humans worshiped and trusted the state. Governments serve justice as well as they do everything else!"

Gia and Kino shared a knowing smirk and shook their heads.

"Oh, and you and your sisters are fonts of wisdom and mercy? You shouldn't have been chasing Kino in the first place!"

"I had every right! I could smell the guilt on her."

"True," Hermes retorted, "but what happened to Gia wasn't her fault. Kino's busy dealing with her own ailment. You can't hold her responsible."

"...What?" Kino demanded.

Hermes took a moment to calm down, then, "Kino has what's called a 'dissociative disorder.' It's common in post-traumatic stress. I saw it happen. When Kino begged her parents not to operate on her, they tried to stab her to death! She ran away, and her real feelings have been locked up in a vault ever since."

"Hermes...!" Kino scolded, not at all liking her inner psyche being paraded out for some sort of amateur analysis.

"Are you trying to concoct some sort of insanity plea?" Christine shrilled, for once losing control of that perfectly-modulated voice.

But Gia slapped her palm on the car's fender. "No! It's time for you to listen for once, girl." And the speakers fell silent.

_Yow...! The Fury really does answer to her._ Kino filed that revelation away to gnaw on later. "Hermes, I don't appreciate you saying I'm incompetent."

"Will you listen to yourself? Not just what you're saying, the _way_ you're saying it. She was finally coming out of her shell when she met you, Gia. What happened to you couldn't have happened at a worse time. Kino relapsed."

"If I may, Gia," and everyone could hear Christine spoke through clenched teeth, "she looked pretty emotional when she saw that noose. Didn't she just walk away to have herself a little breakdown?"

"Sure," Gia nodded. "It would take something like that. A normal person would be a complete wreck right now. I thought Kino was just playing it cool but... she really has a problem, huh?"

"And Delirium's realm is outside your jurisdiction, Tisiphone," Hermes concluded with a triumphant note of his own. "She's sane, but you can't expect her to go change the world when she's wrestling with her own—"

"Please stop talking about me like I'm some specimen in a beaker," Kino interrupted. Too numb to summon up the tantrum that would refute Hermes, she sat in the dust by the fire to pout.

Gia promptly joined her and put an arm 'round her shoulder. "Ain't we a pair?" She deliberately smiled her messed-up, creepy smile, and Kino's stony face hid the pain it brought her. "Add in Christine's 'anger management issues' and Hermes is the only sane one in the bunch."

The fire hissed and crackled. A coyote warbled somewhere in the distance. Kino allowed herself to relax into Gia's half-embrace.

"A wake of corpses is not an 'anger management issue,'" Hermes grumbled.

"Thank you for... taking up for me, Hermes. But Christine's right too." Kino reached up and presumed to put a hand gently on one of the car's red fenders, and abruptly felt that her hand was touching not cooling metal, but the flank of some great beast curled protectively about the campfire. "The Furies," Kino quoted in a humble, placating tone, "...will not be denied; we get it. Yes, there is good and there is evil in the world. I still prefer not to get tangled up in that fight where possible, and I'm definitely not on _your_ side, Christine. But yeah, I concede your point."

"Mortal," The silky voice warned gently, mollified at last, "in the end you must choose sides."

Kino turned admiring if bloodshot eyes on Gia. Of Georgiana, the simple, flirtatious trucker's daughter she'd once picnicked with at a sunny roadside rest stop, who worked so hard to be perfect for her upright parents, there was little sign. But there was less of the sickly, twisted parody of humanity the operation made of people. Gia was alive, healthy, predatory, even vicious. She bore the imprint of her fell companion. Gia frightened Kino, and intrigued her too. She was pale from days spent sleeping and nights awake. She was gaunt but wiry-strong. Her hair, grown out again, was still raven-black against a white hairband and her eyes had grown more vividly dark.

_And she still makes my world go sparkly! "Fermions."_

"I don't think Gia will ever fully recover; the damage was too great," Christine admitted with sympathy in her voice, "but she is free again. She's no longer something less than human, and she's a great help to me. I hope that Hermes can help you."

_Is Gia evil? Is that what evil looks like?_

The twisted smile widened. "Well, if you're not gonna make the first move, I will." Gia abruptly took Kino by the arm and tugged her toward the car. "My father gave me an order when I woke up from the operation," She opened the door and reeled an unprotesting Kino into the backseat. "Free, am I? Let's find out."

"Hey!" Hermes protested, but the trio ignored him. The door closed, the great engine ignited and sped off into the night. Christine's red tail lights vanished and left him alone, to watch the campfire flicker out.

Until...

_Leave the mortals to their sport, for they are as mayflies to us. _The words of Tisiphone, sounding delighted and amused, reached Hermes in the old language.

_For too long have the dark gods been defied. We are old and primal and we too must be served. A place is ordained in the world for wrath and bloodlust, for revenge and strife and for all things, and their place you must not deny. Your arid wisdom alone cannot satiate your disciple's soul nor heal that of mine. But I have unlocked Gia fetters, and donned mine gladly. In her triumph this night belongs to them, and they to the night and to the Children of Night. Be at peace, wanderer. They must both go into the dark by and by, and this is as it must be. Leave them to consummate accord between us, which we shall abide by for their sakes, for their lives long._

_Question not the rites of the underworld._

* * *

_**Death really gives you an appetite.**_

* * *

In the dim of the dawn, with the clouds blushing pink to welcome the sun, the car returned to Hermes. The door opened and Kino crawled out, naked and spent, to lie down on the soft sand in the fading darkness. Gia too emerged and stood over her, a black silhouette with legs spread and hands at her bared hips.

At last she tossed Kino's clothes and khaki coat out to the scrub-dotted desert with a laugh.

"Gia?" Hermes said. "You have your own volition again. The puppet's strings are cut. But you're responsible for what you do now. That's what being 'grown up' really means."

The woman cocked her head.

"So what will you do?"

"Dunno. I'll hafta think about that." She climbed back into the car, and they drove off to find some shady, secluded spot to sleep the day away.

After an interval the sky brightened and blued, and Kino said languidly, "Hermes?"

"Hey."

"Every time I start to get bored and think I've learned what you have to teach me, we run across something new."

"We've been traveling together for a long time, but there are places and things even I can't show you. I'm glad for you."

"Thank you for waiting so long."

"Hmm? What do you mean?"

"For... how long have you been waiting here?"

"All last night."

Kino sat up, very surprised. "That— ...was a strange trip."

"Yes, I expect it was. I look forward to hearing all about it. Are you a little better now?"

"I dunno." Kino flopped back in the soft sand, denuded body and soul. "I guess you're right about me, Hermes. But it's not something easily fixed. How does a turtle escape its shell?"

"How does a bird? You should get dressed. The sun's coming up and someone might see you there."

Kino snorted. She stood and stretched, her modesty banished for just this little while as the sun she'd despaired of ever seeing again rose over the nearby hills and chased all the cold shadows away. Finally, almost reluctantly, she reached for her clothes. She was tickled to discover naughty Gia had swapped Kino's boxers for her own silk dainties. Once Kino dressed she rekindled a little fire for her breakfast.

"And for the record," Hermes added, "I still say they're both crazy."

"Do you think Gia will be alright?" Kino asked.

"Well, we're very different from them, but Tisiphone and I have this one thing in common: we take care of those we love. Kino...?"

* * *

_**What will we do now?**_

_**- Don't know. We'll have to think about that.**_

* * *

That afternoon, Kino the Traveler approached a town.

"Maybe you should fit me with a GPS," Hermes said.

Kino shook her head. "Where's the fun in that? Maps are cheap, and I like relying on my own resources. Terrain association, a compass... Master taught me all about intersections and resections. Don't wanna let all that go to waste. Besides, Christine told me this was the fastest way to get away from the Badlands."

"You trust her?"

"Well... no," Kino smirked. "Wheels within wheels with her. But I am gonna take some of her advice. I'm my own person and my beliefs are very different. I was raised to be humble and avoid confrontation and to try to keep everything in harmony. But she has a point. Maybe we do have a duty to take sides when we see something really, really wrong."

"Then what will you do?"

"Whatever I can." She patted the reassuring mass of her holster. "So maybe all this was for the best."

Hermes grunted. The land grew greener and the trees taller as they hummed smoothly forward.

"When you change the scenery," Kino quoted, "sometimes it changes you right back."

"Who said that?"

"I forget." Kino smiled. She glanced up at the real-estate billboard just ahead. It read, "Come visit Stepford, Connecticut. You'll feel right at home."

"Let's just hope we don't have to worry about it for a while."

.


	11. Chapter 11

.

* * *

**_Timothy's Elegy_**

* * *

They'd rushed home when they heard. Not that there was any real hurry, of course. But it was the principle - it was family.

Cecy had told Gia. A stranger had just walked up and told her, and Gia immediately knew it was her foster sister talking. The man had walked on, then looked about, rather shaken by his unaccustomed blackout. Gia was gone by then, though, rushing back to the car to share the sad news.

Gia had a mad urge to find Kino and invite her, but Christine put her foot down, as expected. The family was very private. Momma Elliott had explained that a wicked, vengeful relative had once divulged their secrets, and forced the family to flee. That would not be allowed to happen again.

They'd arrived in time for the funeral. The Elliots were, surprisingly, not ones to create a big production or fuss on these sad occasions, rare as they were for such a family. But Gia had been obliged to give Christine a thorough washing. While Gia scrubbed brake-dust from Christine's rims, squeejee-ed windex from her windows, and sprayed gel on her tires, they took a welcome break from the solemnity of the occasion with a cheery duet of "Splish Splash."

Then Gia rushed to the bath, and thence into a simple black gown with matching lace made ready for her. Respect.

Gia shared in a tiny libation at the wake, and dropped her handful of soil at the burial.

She'd liked old Timothy Elliott instantly. She saw at the time that he was decrepit, and some cautious part of her heart had braced itself, not allowing her to grow too attached. Nevertheless she missed the voice like fine summer wine flowing from the ancient oak barrel of his body. She would miss the busy Gene Kelly tap dance of his fingers across the old typewriter, so worn the letters had vanished, unmissed, from keys so well known.

He'd taught her the ways to foil the Autumn People, corruptors who, among other things, tempt with empty promises of turning back the clock and calendar. He'd warned her not to fall for that, not to yearn for years that could never return, but instead to treasure the years she had, and the memories. Good advice then, that would grow better as she grew older. In her time with the Elliott family, too brief yet, the old scribe had taught her much.

She listened to the words of ageless Nef, recited by Cecy, advice shared with Timothy almost a lifetime ago, now directed to the mortal members of this extraordinary house. "The best thing to do is to live your life to the fullest, enjoy every moment, and lay yourself down many years from now, happily realizing that you've filled every moment, every hour, every year of your life and that you are much loved by the Family." Such was Timothy's eulogy, and Gia silently promised to live by this wisdom.

A fine June had driven away the usual fog and gloom, and the Elliott home looked bright and cheery with its colorful (though tasteful, always tasteful!) burgundy and fir-green paint. After the eulogy and the burial the family retired to their sprawling manse, hidden away amid the bogs, leaving Timothy to sleep.

Gia waited patiently near her adopted mother. She spoke when spoken to, which was very often, to the members of her family with every ounce of decorum she could muster. Mama Elliott had been grooming her for her debut, but this large gathering had pre-empted that, and the former trucker's daughter was determined to have this elegant, aristocratic family think well of her. She politely hid her reaction to finally meeting the larger or more baroque relatives, as she'd been warned. They in turn seemed to know all about her sickly smile and paid it no heed.

Finally, after a slightly wilted mama Elliott had paid due attention to everyone's well-wishing, she sat, gracefully yet, in a rattan chair in her accustomed breakfast nook. Gia promptly brought two cups (California merlot, a root beer for herself - Timothy's favorites) and she waited as if for a report card.

The weary matron didn't notice this, at first, which showed how distracted she was beneath the facade. But in a longer-than-usual moment she understood. The remarkable lady seemed always to understand people's intentions or desires with nothing but a glance.

"Admirably done, Gia. Many rough edges, but don't fret. You and I will have time to tend to finer points. I only regret that we've spoiled your debutante ball."

"I miss him," Gia said.

"Ah, a life such as his, child, with such accomplishments and lived to a ripe old age, must be celebrated, not mourned." Gia wanted a hug and, sure enough, as quickly found herself inside the warm, now-familiar bat-wing embrace. "Yes, I miss him too," mama Elliott continued. "Welcome home, daughter. You too are much loved by the Family."

"Mama," Gia answered, eyes misting, perfectly content to let the hug last a long time.

* * *

**_June 6th, 2012_**

* * *

**_._**


	12. Chapter 12

Ha! Kino finally got to use that dang feather!

So, indulge me in another afterword?

I never meant for _Old Haunts_ to happen. After "Land of Freedom" I knew I wanted to explore Kino's intimate life, and what sort of person she'd choose as a lover. I also knew that such a character couldn't hang around without altering the _Kino's Journey_ format. Meanwhile I was also wanting to tell a story about a return to her home town. Neither story was strong enough on its own, but they slammed together in my mind and created "Reprise." Gia herself evolved to best suit the needs of that story. She was a throwaway character to be stuffed into Gail Simone's famous refrigerator at the end.

But she was still alive and honestly, I'm proud of that story. I had meant to explore Kino's gender-bending, and inadvertantly came up with something of a human-rights piece. Your humble author is very much straight, and in prior years I felt gay-rights was simply "not my fight." But I'm seeing here in the US and reading abroad of hate and discrimination approaching prewar Germany levels. As Christine said, at some point one must choose sides.

Well, I'd thought to see the last of Gia in the sequel, "Threnody." Have a rare peek inside the cutting room. I always start writing at the ending - here's how I planned to finish that story:

* * *

_Gia felt someone sit down on her bed. She woke up and expected it to be morning, expected to see her mother smiling down at her. But It was still night. She blinked the sleep from her eyes and saw-_

_"Kino? What are you doing here?"_

_"Hi Gia," Kino whispered with a friendly smile. "I just wanted to check up on you, find out how you were doing."_

_"Oh. That's nice of you," Gia sat up a little and whispered back, "I'm fine."_

_"How's life been since your operation?"_

_"Just fine. My dad calls me his 'perfect little girl' all the time now. I'm very grateful." Gia smiled, and her smile reminded Kino of a Jack-o-Lantern cut by a careless child._

_After a moment's pause Gia said, "are you alright Kino? You sound sad."_

_"I am sad." Kino began fiddling with some sort of device in the shadows. "I miss you. I wanted to travel with you."_

_"Sorry," Gia shrugged. "What are you doing?"_

_"I have a little chore," Kino whispered gently, her poker-face locked around her like an iron mask. She picked up a pillow and wrapped it around her arm. "I have to kill you now, but it won't hurt a bit, I promise."_

_Gia cocked her head. "Oh?"_

_Kino paused for a moment, watching, hoping against all odds for something more than that horrid inhuman "oh?" Then..._

_"Gia, can you remember something for me? It's very important. Promise me."_

_"I promise," Gia said. "I'm good at remembering." She looked like an eager student told there would be a quiz. With her free hand, Kino gently nudged Gia's head back down and brushed her cropped black hair tenderly._

_"I want you to ask around for Hikari and Rakka. If you can..." Kino paused for a moment to settle herself. "...find them, they'll be your friends and take good care of you. Promise me?"_

_"Hikari and Ra—"_

Pyink!

_Silence. Then, a rattling noise._

_Kino slipped out the inn's window and, with a single ragged sob, vanished into the shadows._

* * *

...sad. Right out of _Old Yeller _or maybe_ Cookoo's Nest_. But King's Christine, originally just a cameo in "Reprise," was so much fun I was tempted to have her seduce Kino into abandoning Hermes for an episode. No. No! Bad idea! Toxifies the great relationship that was building between Kino and Hermes. But what about Gia?

So I discarded that original ending. Instead of dying, Gia was captured by the car and shown off as a final barb to snatch Kino's victory out of her hands.

The pair got one last scene, spying on Kino and Hermes and scheming, in "The Great Wasteland." And that, finally, was to be the end.

Yet that scene and their relationship both frightened and intrigued me. Gia remained a good person, but horribly damaged, with the operation and the car's evil to overcome. Christine is a macabre thing exploiting and dominating her. Yet... there was affection too. Such potential...!

Alright... I envisioned one last story, an epilogue to show them traveling just like Kino and Hermes. What happens when _Kino's Journey_, which preaches the gentle Eastern idea of accepting good with bad ("the world is not beautiful, therefore it is,") must confront the harsh Western concept of fiendish, diabolical Evil? What happens when Siddhartha meets Satan? Oooh, now that's interesting!

When I left Kino and Hermes roaring up I-Five north of Los Angeles, and Gia and Christine in a desolate heath, my thought was to revisit Kino's adventures and have the demon-car undo any good Kino had accomplished. Start by murdering Nimya... ugh, no! Creatively sterile, depressing, no fun, not even for a single story. Bad way to finish _Curve._ Perhaps that would have been Christine's plan, but I didn't want even to read that story, let alone write it.

Months passed.

October. For Hallowe'en I showed some friends _The Haunting of Hill House._ If you've read the book or seen the excellent Robert Wise film, remember the scenes with Nell driving, a half-crazy, harried girl-woman talking to herself in a car...? Other such scenes reverberated in the echo-chamber of my internal theater: _Carnival of Souls_, the hitchhiker from _The Twilight Zone_, Marion Crane's flight in _Psycho_, all fusing with Arnold at the wheel of his beloved Christine. _Old Haunts_ grew from that seed. What if... what if Gia and Christine revisited sites from old horror stories, now an indefinite number of decades later? Ah, now that sounded more promising! Finally, I was ready to begin a new series, a dark reflection of _Kino's Journey._ First stop – Hill House.

That's how lucky Gia was promoted from redshirt to leading role, and Christine went from cameo to... anti hero? Anti villain? Yandere? Magnificent bastard? She's vastly more complicated now than in her original novel. And Gia got to do things that Kino never could, like join a family, something Kino desperately wants, but can't have without ending the show.

As a side benefit, in _Old Haunts _I also had a license to mimic the authors in question. How fun! And perhaps in doing so a little of their magic would rub off on me?

In writing these tales, I've come up with some thoughts on the evolution of prose style. Most likely what I've discovered will be old news to even an English undergrad, but I'm enthused and I might even stumble upon something useful, like the archaeology minor who goes to a dig and happens across a find.

The eldest writer I sought to capture was H.P. Lovecraft. Now Howard I know. The dark master from Providence genuinely frightens me because his tentacled monsters embody a materialistic nihilism supported by astronomy. When Neitzche proclaimed, "God is dead," Lovecraft dared to explore what that meant to humans, and populated his cosmos with vast maggots devouring the corpse.

But his style... antique even in his day, influenced by colonials like Poe and Dunsany! To mimic him, why, simply grab your thesaurus and substitute plain adjectives with overblown, flowery ones. To mimic him well you must choose your adjectives more carefully, of course. He was honestly trying to give a reader their time's worth with beautiful, thought-provoking language. Good stuff... in his day. But our definition of beautiful, elevated prose has evolved since then, and left poor Howard behind.

Along came Strunk and White – omit needless words! Along came Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" – any verbiage used to conceal rather than reveal meaning is a deceit! Along came Hemingway. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Devastating!

Keep it pithy! Minimalism became the order of the day, perhaps in a reaction against the romantics like Hawthorne and melancholy post-romantics like Lovecraft. Their overgrown heaps of purple roses and nostalgic marigolds were hacked away with a machete and burned with the trash.

The result was a generation of superb artisans and craftsmen, but not poets. Shirley Jackson vivisects her characters with clinical coldness, then smothers them with a pillow. Richard Matheson stabs his readers with sharp switchblade sentences, and whatever redemption his protagonists find comes only from accepting their lot. Neil Gaiman once called writing for comics an exercise in "draconian economics." It shows in his prose too, no matter how grand or whimsical his story. Ellison seizes center stage like a Jewish Victor Hugo.

I'd told my friend who goes by the pen name "Aubigne Spratling" my thoughts about a Robert Bloch story and she insisted that I add it. She's a big fan of showtunes, so the _Phantom_ riff was my little gift to her.

Stephen King, as overrated by his fans as underrated by the literati (who I suspect curl up with him by night after a hard day's Proust), sounds like a particularly talented uncle telling ghost stories around a cub scout camp fire. I flatter myself to claim that my own style, such as it is, parallels his more than the others. Those italicized thoughts are his hallmark. Sigsawa by contrast never lets us see Kino's innermost thoughts, preferring she look outward rather than inward. King detests adverbs, and I dare call him a bit excessive there. But dang, he can take even a silly idea like a haunted car and turn it into a tragic love story!

All craftsmen. All fine. All (like myself) incapable of poetry. Road-runners and emus incapable of flight.

And there are those who rebel.

Enter Ray Bradbury. He has learned the spartan lessons of the twentieth century, yet he dares, almost with childish truculance, to say "no!" No, you cannot have my poetry. You cannot take away my dinosaurs or my Buck Rogers collection; would you rip out my heart?

He's not the best plotter in the bunch. For the creativity of stories and scenarios, and despite "The Shadow over Innsmouth" ticking along like a swiss watch, I'd give the laurels to Matheson, who just barely noses out King. King can miraculously make a clunker work; Matheson miraculously doesn't make clunkers.

Bradbury's voice was hardest of all because his is, quite simply, the best. He uses pithy, carefully chosen and simple language, yes. But he makes it leap and prance and sing! Cecy, for only one example, exults in her flights and we must, if we be human, exult with her. Montag falls for Clarisse in only a few short pages, and so must we, for she burns with a love of ideas as her creator does.

Bradbury's nouns – lo, great leaping lists of nouns! – he is as much in love with nouns as Lovecraft was with adjectives. The man is drunk with words. He chokes the furnace that burned all those roses with his summer dandelions.

I do not have the honor of knowing any of these people except as a fan at book-signings. I can boast friendship with the real-life "Tom," one of Mr. Bradbury's friends, a southern gentleman of literary tastes who keeps company with the living treasure in his decline. Through Robert I gave _Kino's Journey_ in translation to Mr. Bradbury for his eighty-ninth birthday. No idea if Mr. Bradbury read it, but the least Robert deserves is my dedicating "One of Us" to him.

I but poorly aped Mr. Bradbury here. He makes me write above my humble ability and it's impossible to sustain. And however much I enjoyed Gia and Christine's bickering, inevitably my dialogue interrupted the magic dance with cold splashes of naturalism. Indeed I wish I'd better captured each of these authors, to better show how much I admire them and appreciate what they've given us.

Well, this is fan-fiction after all. We're here to have fun and to show our appreciation, with whatever broken music we can muster.

Credit where it's due:

- Nathanial Hawthorne, "The Birthmark"

- Stephen King, _Christine_

_- _Aeschylus,_ The Eumenides_

- Shirley Jackson, _The Haunting of Hill House_

- Richard Matheson, "The Children of Noah," along with "Prey" and _Hell House_

- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow over Innsmouth"

- Ray Bradbury, _From the Dust Returned_ and _Something Wicked This Way Comes_

- Harlan Ellison, "Along the Scenic Route" (with a nod to "You Drive" by Earl Hamner Jr for Rod Serling's _The Twilight Zone_.)

- Robert Bloch, "The Animal Fair"

_- _Neil Gaiman,_ The Sandman, _with a final salute to Ira Levin's _The Stepford Wives_.

- and of course Keiichi Sigsawa,_ Kino's Journey_

Musical credits for the songs Christine's enamored of: "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" composed by Doug Ingle. "Wake Up Little Suzie" by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. "Wooly Bully" by Domingo Samudio. "Hound Dog" by Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller. "Here, There and Everywhere" by Paul McCartney. "Scarborough Fair" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Paul Simon, the former adapted from British Folk. "In the Good Old Summer Time" by George Evans and Ren Shields. "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan. "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe. "Revolution Calling" and "Breaking the Silence" by QueensrŸche. "The Banana Boat Song" adapted from Jamaican Folk by Irving Burgie. "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin. Whew!

Although the story of how Gia lost and found her family has reached a happy conclusion, it's not necessarily finished. Another chapter might occur to me somewhere down the line. There are so many writers I'd love to learn from this way. So check in every now and again. As always, don't be shy about asking questions or leaving reviews or suggestions. Writers live on compliments and coffee, and I'm all out of coffee.

- The Blue Footed Booby

* * *

**_Miscellanous Annotations_**

The Fury Tisiphone hails from Greek mythology. She and her sisters Alecto and Magaera feature in Aeschylus' play _The Eumenides_, though it is Virgil who names them in _The Aenead._

_How to Win Friends and Influence People_ is the archetypal self-help book on harmonious human relations.

The "Veracidelitarians" of course cannot be named directly as they have aggressive lawyers. The various quotes, neologisms, jargon, and the use of "M-Paths" for "accounting" aren't far from the mark. Nonetheless, the author they revere deserves his place here.

Oddly, I personally hold no ire toward the organization he left us at present, because I believe they perform a service for those who wish to be relieved of the burden of being themselves and making their own decisions. The felonies they (including their founder's wife) were convicted of in the seventies in Clearwater, Florida are on public record.

Cecy and the rest of the Elliott family have quite the literary history. First created by Ray Bradbury in a series of short stories, the publisher commissioned one Charles Addams to paint the cover. Addams was so taken by the Elliotts that, with Bradbury's blessing, he went on to create a series of cartoons for the New Yorker called "The Addams Family." When it grew into a television series, another network countered with "The Munsters." Mr. Bradbury recently brought the Elliott saga to a close with _From the Dust Returned._

The protagonist of Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" was named Robert Olmstead, and he carefully researched his genealogy near the end of that tale. Imagine my joy when I saw he too was of an "Eliot" family.

Sadly, the film version of _Something Wicked This Way Comes_ was not successful. The pre-Eisner Disney company rushed the production, botched the ending, until finally Mr. Bradbury himself ventured into the editing room to salvage the final cut. Glimpses of the masterpiece it might have been may be seen in Mr. Dark's galvanizing monologue.

The hazards of the "badlands" references several of Harlan Ellison's post-apocalyptic tales, including "Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman," and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." The dog in "A Boy and His Dog" spoke, and I capitalized on that to draw a connection with Riku in _Kino's Journey._

And the shot I had the temerity to fire across the great writer's bow? I really do feel Mr. Ellison dwells too much upon his past misfortunes, and uses them as a convenient excuse for his legendary bellicose behavior. It mars his work and legacy, in my opinion. Rather than let her misfortunes define her, Gia chooses to define herself.

And yes, he really did end one of his more snarky editorials, this one on ecology, with "and fuck you too." How could I resist swiping that gem?

Rod Serling's magnificent _Twilight Zone_ series featured a "haunted car" episode. I revere that series and I'm glad I could tie it into Christine's history.

Gaiman's Morpheus often played a supporting role in _The Sandman._ The protagonist of the day faces some crisis, but at the halfway point in the tale, a dream sent by and featuring the Dream King alters the character's destiny. I adore that! Dream demonstrates his power while barely even showing up. The Furies also appeared in the series, as referenced by Horo and Hanyuu back in "Threnody."

Again I let cold reality intrude upon poor Kino's idyll. The Nazis forced female homosexuals and "vagabonds" such as the Romani to wear black triangle badges.

Kino's recurring high school dreams incorporate Sigsawa's own tongue-in-cheek _Gakuen Kino_ stories, in which stoical Kino becomes a magical girl in a high school anime setting. Her plea to Kana for help deliberately echoes the miraculous climax of _Haibane Renmei._

Inanna and Erishkigal is a Sumerian (modern day Iraq, but pre-Babylonian) fertility myth, among the oldest stories we can still remember. The theme of empowerment by embracing our Jungian Shadow-self and our mortality resonates even today. No better parallel exists for the romance between sunny Kino and her dark reflection, Gia.

Kino finishes the tale as she began it, by driving toward an all-too-familiar town. Levin satirized the smothering of women's spirits and potential in a paternalistic society, and Sigsawa admirably has Kino's "hometown," Japan itself, stifle its citizens with enforced conformity and socio-economic castes. Kino will feel "right at home" in Stepford, oh yes! Hope she brought plenty of ammo.

Ray Bradbury left us on June 6th, 2012. The world and Los Angeles especially is a richer place for having had him.


End file.
